Bady Minck in conversation with Patricia Allmer and Clare O’Dowd

Award-winning filmmaker Bady Minck discusses her cross-disciplinary and collaborative practice and the ongoing influence of Surrealism on her work.

Minck’s deeply philosophical and often political works cross different artistic disciplines, from sculpture and animation to literature and poetry, and her films have won awards and been shown at festivals across the world. Her processes involve collaborations with poets, musicians, and scientists, as well as other artists and filmmakers.

Joining her for this discussion are The Traumatic Surreal curators Professor Patricia Allmer and Dr Clare O’Dowd. Minck’s 2005 film La Belle est la Bête is currently on display in the exhibition.

About the speakers

Bady Minck
Artist, filmmaker and producer

Bady Minck (born in 1962 in Luxembourg) is an artist, filmmaker, and producer working in Vienna and Luxembourg. She studied sculpture at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and experimental film at the University of Applied Arts. In 1995 she co-founded the AMOUR FOU film production company, which she named after the 1937 prose work by André Breton, and she also works with Minotaurus Film Luxembourg.

Professor Patricia Allmer
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Edinburgh

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays have transformed the study of modern and contemporary women artists and surrealism, starting in 2009 with her curation of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic.

Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and The Traumatic Surreal (2022). Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.

Dr Clare O’Dowd
Research Curator, Henry Moore Institute

Dr Clare O’Dowd is Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Art History prior to joining the Institute in 2019.

As well as teaching, writing and lecturing on modern and contemporary sculpture, she has researched and curated exhibitions at institutions including The Whitworth (Subversive Spaces, 2009) and Castlefield Gallery (No Particular Place to Go, 2019). She now leads the Institute’s Sculpture Research Programme of talks, conferences, fellowships and research-focused exhibitions.