You are invited to “Becoming Leonor Fini – Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life,” by Andrea Kollnitz.
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm
Venue: ARC E-02
About the Project: Using theories of performativity, this talk explores Leonor Fini’s (1907-1996) self-fashioning and dressing-up practices, highlighting how her extension of artistic creative practices, from painted artworks to her self-creation through costumes, masks and fashion, allowed her to become a living artwork. Fini’s personal theatricality, photographic self-portraits and self-transformative, genderbending, transgressive dressing-up games in relation to surrealist practices, reveal the hybrid identities that made up Fini’s character. Here, the artist’s self-fashioning must be understood as a substantial creative practice developing and confirming artistic and personal autonomy and pointing to an extended concept of art where creation and self-creation powerfully enable each other.
About the Speaker: Andrea Kollnitz is Professor in Art History and Head of the Art History Department at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on the self-fashioning of avant-garde artists; art and nationalism; the Nordic avant-garde from transnational perspectives. Kollnitz is co-editor of the books Fashion and Modernism (Bloomsbury 2018), A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, vol 2: 1925-1950 (Brill, 2019), Fashion, Performance & Performativity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently leading a research project on Surrealism in Sweden and recently published Becoming Leonor Fini: Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life (Bloomsbury, 2025).
If you are interested in attending, Please RSVP.
* This event is for Pratt community only.