Artists

Groupshow

Press release

«Dada» is a word that belongs to no particular language. When it was proclaimed the name of the new avant-garde movement at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, it already exemplified a liberated experimentation in, with, and between different languages. What does “Dada” mean? The answers are as diverse as the many language experiments performed at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich’s Niederdorf from February 5 to early summer 1916. Sound and simultaneous poems were recited, and animal voices were imitated. The language of First World War propaganda was turned on its head as the lived experiences of migration, violence, and precarity were translated into verses with and without words: through the voice, through physical gestures, loud and soft. What was voiced? What was overlooked, unheard, unread? What can we still know today? In fact, no audio or film recordings of the 1916 performances at Cabaret Voltaire exist. All surviving recordings date from later periods, some made by the aging Dadaists themselves.

The exhibition «DadaZwischenSprachen» (DadaBetweenLanguages) shows, through selected exhibits from 1916 and accompanying documents, how Dadaist language experiments nonetheless took material form: in prints and reports, in drafts, scores, and sketches, later in manifestos, as well as in subsequent reworkings and allusions. The exhibition also highlights the gaps that emerged in the transmission of early Dada impulses: What happened to the voices of women? What happened to the appropriated sources from non-Western cultures? It further demonstrates the—often interrupted—continuities that the initial multilingual and interlingual Dada expressions found in later periods, far beyond Zurich and up to the present day. Dada is still moving between languages. These legacies and critical transformations can be found not only in literature, but also in performance art, pop culture, social critique, and current debates about the relationship between technology, art, the economy, and ways of life.

Alongside historical documents, works from the postwar period to the present connect with these impulses. An accompanying program further develops the exhibition’s themes in dialogue with the public.

At the opening, we look forward to a performance by the legendary Katalin Ladik – poet, artist, and performer. In addition to her work Oooooopus, she will present The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a piece developed specifically for this exhibition. It marks her first-ever performance in Zurich. Later in the evening, Babi Badalov will perform Electronic Dadaism: automatic, algorithmic, geopolitical, topological, and linguistic chaos! The exhibition also marks the opening of the Artists’ Bar featuring contributions by Babi Badalov and Katalin Ladik.

The exhibition and accompanying program are the result of a collaboration between the University of Zurich (Prof. Dr. Sandro Zanetti, Department of Romance Studies, Division of General and Comparative Literary Studies) and Cabaret Voltaire (Salome Hohl), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Agora project “DadaZwischenSprachen”). Contributors: Prof. Dr. Tomáš Glanc (University of Zurich, Institute of Slavic and East European Studies) and Monica Unser (Cabaret Voltaire).