Dada 1916-2016: A Century in Revolt

One hundred years ago Dada was launched on an unsuspecting public at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber and other writers and artists in exile from warring Europe used Dada as a slogan for their experiments with art, language, performance and the subversion of public life. It was international in scope, spreading virus-like across Europe and the world. From Paris to Berlin, Barcelona to New York, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst and Hannah Höch were all part of Dada’s reach. Dada was slippery and mobile, eluding definition, transgressing boundaries, creating new languages for art and affronting its great adversary: the ‘good bourgeois’.

To celebrate the centenary of Dada, this all-day symposium event includes lectures by experts in Dada and contemporary art from the University of Glasgow (David Hopkins, Carl Lavery, Debbie Lewer, Dominic Paterson) and from Royal Holloway University of London (Ruth Hemus and Eric Robertson) together with up-and-coming doctoral researchers in the field. Drawing on Dada texts and anti-texts from the early 20th Century, we will mark its legacy; pointing to art in the 21st century we will remark on its longevity; and in so doing we will look forward as well as back. Difficult to define yet tenacious: Why does this anti-movement still capture the imagination of researchers, artists and fans one hundred years after its inception? Radical, angry, impish, creative, subversive and political: What does Dada have to say to us today?