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ART on view DADA AFRIKA A Trans-Disciplinary Exhibition Project By Michaela Oberhofer, Esther Tisa Francini, and Ralf Burmeister Dada Afrika is the fi rst exhibition devoted specifi cally to the interest of Dada artists in the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. It contributes in a unique way to the celebration of the centenary of the Dada movement in Zurich, which was born there at the Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916. Like Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, Dada artists such as Marcel Janco, Sophie Taeuber 84 Arp, Man Ray, and Hannah Höch had a keen interest in other cultures. Inspired by the artifacts of Africa and Oceania, they created works out of materials that had never before been used in Western art. In the area of literature, authors such as Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara found inspiration for their experimentation with language in the African and Australian oral traditions, which were accessible to them as transcriptions taken from ethnological works. However, the Dadaists were not satisfi ed with merely copying or adapting exotic elements. Instead their intention was to exceed the limits both of their art and their language, in part by drawing inspiration from non-Western cultures. Consisting of more than 100 works drawn from twenty international museums and various private collections, the exhibition and its accompanying catalog are the fruit of a collaboration between the Rietberg Museum, located in the country where Dada was born, and a Berlin institution, the Berlinische Galerie, from which a highly politicized form of Dadaism emerged. The association of these two art centers with such different collections also supports the exhibition’s trans-disciplinary approach to its subject, which is explored from the perspectives of ethnology, art, history, and literature. Combined, these give meaning to the dialog that arises from the juxtaposition of Dadaist works with art from other parts of the world. FIG. 1 (right): View of the entry of Dada Afrika. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. FIG. 2 (above): Raoul Hausmann, OFFEAH, 1918. Poster with poem printed on orange paper. © Berlinische Galerie, BG-G 7224/93. © Berlinische Galerie. Photo: Anja Elisabeth Witte. 2016 ProLitteris, Zurich. The confrontation of the artifacts in this show methodically follows the principles of equivalence and contemporaneousness. The fertile dialog between the Dadaist works and the non-Western ones is complemented by an audio station featuring Dadaist poems (fi g. 2) and the non-Western counterparts that inspired them. For example, Tristan Tzara’s phonetic poem Toto Vaca is juxtaposed with its original source, a Maori song called Toto Waka. A German translation of the latter by a missionary is also presented. Tristan Tzara used the text as a Dadaist “ready-made.”


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