Thursday, January 29, 2026, 17.00-19.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

Join us for this free virtual event hosted by the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) Communications Committee!

We are celebrating the very recent publication of Surrealism and the Tarot: A Love Story in 2025 by Fulgur Press. This event will feature speakers Paulina Caro Troncoso, Victoria Ferentinou, and Laetitia Barbier, and will be hosted by Tessel M. Bauduin.

Register for the event here.

Magicians at the fortune teller’s table: Surrealism and tarot

Other days [. . .] I used to consult my cards, interrogating them far beyond the rules of the game, although according to an invisible personal code, precise enough, trying to obtain from them for now and the future a clear view of my fortune and my misfortune. (Breton, Mad Love, 1937)

Throughout Surrealism’s century-long life the surrealists consulted cards, playing cards as well as tarot cards. They also designed tarot cards, some even creating complete decks. Playing cards and tarot cards functioned in Surrealism as playful predictive mechanisms, divination tools, personal oracles, and objects in mediation and self-transformation, and are still used so in surrealist contexts today.

In this round table we will explore the interactions between Surrealism, especially specific surrealists, and tarot cards and decks. We will touch upon aesthetics and card design, games, fortune-telling and cartomantic practices, and the Smith-Waite’s bad reputation in certain strands of Surrealism, among other things.

The book is available here.

Photo: Fulgur Press. Cover design by Studio Mingus.

Speakers:

French-born Laetitia Barbier is an independent scholar, tarot reader, and teacher with a BA in Art History from La Sorbonne. From 2012 to 2024, she served as programming director, head librarian, and occasional curator at Morbid Anatomy. Her book Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive (2021) features a foreword by Rachel Pollack. With artist Lou Benesch, she co-created the Camena Tarot and collaborates regularly with the French maître-cartier Grimaud, including on the re-release of their 1930 Tarot de Marseille and Belline Oracle. Laetitia has lectured and taught taromancy and card divination history for institutions all around the world such as Greenwood Cemetery, the New York Public Library, Fotografiska, the College of Psychic Studies in London and The Tokyo Tarot Museum, She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Paulina Caro Troncoso is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). Before this role, she was a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History (Italy). She is currently working on her monograph, Roberto Matta, Surrealism and Cold War Politics: A Revolutionary Poetics, 1940–70 (Bloomsbury, 2026). She has published articles in Bulletin of Latin American Research (2023) and Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (2023) and also contributed essays to The Routledge Companion to Surrealism (Routledge, 2022) and Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Victoria Ferentinou is Assistant Professor at the University of Ioannina where she teaches art theory and history of art. She was the recipient of a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain (2003–7) and a CHS-CCS research fellowship from the University of Harvard (2019–20). Ferentinou is a co-editor of the books Surrealism, Occultism, and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous (Routledge, 2018) and The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2023). She edited the volume Visual Ecotopias: History, Theory, Criticism (University of Ioannina Publications, 2023) based on the papers of the homonymous international symposium that she organised in the framework of the 1st Biennale of Western Balkans (2018). Her research interests include the history and theories of modern art (with emphasis on Surrealism), feminist art, theory and aesthetics, the crossover between alternative epistemologies and art theory and practice, and eco-aesthetics and the visual arts.

Dr Tessel M. Bauduin originally trained as a medievalist but has specialized in modernism and avant-garde art, culture, and heritage for twenty years, with particular expertise in Surrealism. Based at the University of Amsterdam, she teaches Museum Studies, Heritage Studies, and Memory Studies. Her current research focuses on critical heritage ecologies, the decolonization of museum collections (especially modernist collections), and surrealist curiosity cabinets. Dr. Bauduin served on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism from 2022 to 2025. She was awarded a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship to the UK in 2023. Her edited volume Surrealism and the Tarot was published by Fulgur Press in 2025.