DADA SOUTH? EXPERIMENTATION, RADICALISM AND RESISTANCE

‘Unlock your head at last! Open it up to the demands of our time!’ is one of the many provocative and rallying cries of a group of artists, writers and performers frustrated with the inability of traditional art forms to adequately address the poisoned climate of World War I. They called their movement Dada, a word chosen at random to point to the absurdity of what they were faced with: corrupt politicians, self-censoring media and an art market that pandered to the elite and upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie. Art’s only sane option, in its impotence, was to throw away all the rules and head for the streets. It was 1916.

It is nearly a century since Dada first touched the central nerve of western culture, attacking its logic, denouncing its ideas of community and nationhood, and demanding total freedom of thought. One of Dada’s primary revolutions is the reinvention of art as a form of tactics. Seen in this way, their work represents the origins of many of the forms we see in contemporary art. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dada attitudes found refreshed expression in Neo-Dada movements such as Fluxus, Arte Povera, the Situationist International and Pop Art, which preceded and deeply influenced Minimalism and Conceptual Art. It was in the 1960s that these ideas began to filter into South African art.

Dada South? presents a collision of artistic strategies and forms that reflect the impact of Dada; works that are conceived and enacted in the spirit of Dada, which seek to question the conventions, values and function of art in a troubled society. The exhibition surveys an alternative history of resistance in a culture of isolation and repression, one that intersects with the canon of ‘resistance art’, but which deviates into forms that are less didactic, more eclectic and experimental. In the recuperation of these lesser-known histories, Dada South? proposes new vocabularies for South African art.

It's easier to scratch the ass than the heart. Francis Picabia, 1921

One of Dada’s lasting legacies is a style of provocation that postures as politics, but in fact ridicules its forms and institutions. Is it not paradoxical then, to host museum exhibitions about a movement that sought to destroy conventions, institutions and value systems? How we can talk about anarchy and the radical when we are bound by conventions of display and the inevitable fetishisation of the art object that the art museum supports?

South African art is often thought to suffer from an ‘anxiety of influence’ from Western artworld centres. Part of this perception is a poor understanding of our own art history. Dada South? intends to invert this by asserting South African practice as part of international art history; acknowledging a range of remarkable artistic positions that have called upon western influences selectively, even randomly, to develop local, indigenous responses to specific conditions of South African history.
A major part of this process is about recuperating lost histories, practices and experiments. It is difficult to tell this story, as many works produced in a radical spirit were temporary interventions. They were not necessarily intended as art objects in the traditional sense, and certainly not expected to be purchased by museums for future preservation. As such, many such gestures exist only as oral histories and anecdotes that are occasionally backed up with an ephemeral document, like a poster, photograph, flyer or newspaper article found during an archival hunt.

Dada stood for freedom. Art may be useless but it is also indispensable. Michael Kimmelman, 2006

We would like Dada South? to be an ongoing, participatory project of documentation and research. To contribute to the Dada South archive of experimental practices, please email dadasouthza@gmail.com

The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips. Francis Picabia, 1920

I applaud all ideas, but nothing else, only the ideas interest me and not what gravitates around them, profiting from ideas disgusts me. "One has to live," you tell me? You know as well as I that our existence is short compared to the profit one can gain from an invention; we're on the earth since the day before yesterday and we'll die tomorrow. Francis Picabia, 1921

The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art…it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose.... Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve’… Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves may have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market. Sylvère Lotringer, 2009

TAKE DADA SERIOUSLY, IT’S WORTH IT!

The Dada movement was founded in 1916 in the midst of World War I. A group of exiled intellectuals and artists, drawn to the neutrality of Switzerland, responded to a newspaper advertisement from Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings which invited artists of “whatever orientation” to make contributions “of any kind”. They converged in Zürich at the Cabaret Voltaire, a small avant-garde theatre café, on 5 February 1916.

The Cabaret Voltaire... has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. Hugo Ball, 1916

In Zürich, we had no interest in the abattoirs of the World War…while the thunder of artillery rumbled away in the distance, we were putting together collages, reciting, writing verse, and singing with all our hearts. We were looking for an elementary type of art that we thought would save mankind from the raging madness of those times. We aspired to a new order that could re-establish the balance between heaven and hell. This art quickly became the object of general reprobation. It was hardly surprising that the ‘bandits’ could not understand us. Their puerile obsession with authoritarianism demands that even art should serve to stupefy mankind. Hans Arp, 1948

The word ‘dada’ was chosen at random to undermine Western rationalist thinking; a playful anti-statement that pointed to their commitment to the absurd.

I know excellent people who have the name Dada. Mr. Jean Dada; Mr. Gaston Dada; Picabia’s dog is called Zizi de Dada…Dada belongs to everybody. Like the idea of God or of the tooth-brush. There are people who are very dada; there are dadas everywhere all over and in every individual. Like God and the tooth-brush (an excellent invention, by the way). Tristan Tzara, 1921

Embracing intuitive processes and strategies of chance, the Zürich Dadaists desired to achieve a ‘total’ experience akin to a spiritual transformation that would overcome the concerns of the individual ego. Disillusioned with the consequences of Western ideals like ‘reason’ and ‘civilization’, they looked beyond the conservative norms of modern Europe. The traditions and practices of non-western cultures, particularly those of Africa, offered an alternative that found hybrid form in their objects and performances.

From a post-colonial viewpoint, the adoption of non-western cultural motifs by Western art is always treated with suspicion. In contrast to other practices of the time, where African imagery was ‘borrowed’ as an exotic curiosity, the Dadaists seemed to appreciate the transformative intentions of ritual practices in both a personal and collective sense.

Through rhythm and dance, they explored alternatives to verbal communication. Hugo Ball, wrapped in cardboard shapes, delivered absurdist poems in a trance-inducing drone. Fashioned from everyday materials; costumes, masks and puppets were danced to life by Sophie Taeuber, Emmy Hennings and the others.

Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost. Hans Arp, 1916

We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture... they represent not human characters and passions, but…passions that are larger than life. The horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, is made visible. Hugo Ball, 1916

Dada’s rejection of bourgeois values was amplified by the Berlin Dadaists to accommodate their more explicit political agendas. It was Hannah Höch who developed photomontage, and the technique would become her signature for works created with both political and aesthetic intentions.

Dada montage aimed to give something that was utterly unreal the appearance of reality…our whole aim was to give an artistic interpretation of things from the world of machines and industry…we called this photomontage because it reflected our aversion to claiming to be artists. We regarded ourselves as engineers…Collage was born with the Dada movement, and it never ceased to hold me. I always believed that one should not only use it for tendentious work or applied art…it was a form of expression complete in itself and could culminate in purely aesthetic work. Hannah Höch, 1959/1968

The Berlin Dadaists organised The First International Dada Fair (Dada-Messe) in June 1920. The exhibition included photomontages and collages by Höch and her partner Raoul Hausmann, as well as John Heartfield. Heartfield also presents two collaborative works. With George Grosz, he made The Enraged Conservative Bourgeois (1920), an assemblage figure that celebrates the mechanical Constructivist work of Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), while also pointing to the violence and ravaged bodies of the war.

With Rudolph Schlichter, Heartfield constructs The Prussian Archangel (1920), a threatening figure suspended from the ceiling. Horrified by the various depictions of German authorities in compromising and unflattering positions, a colonel from the Reichswehr who visited the exhibition exclaimed “You are all criminals and you ought to be shot!” The work was singled out as particularly offensive and the organisers of the exhibition subsequently faced prosecution. The sentence received was lenient, partly because the accused humbled themselves in their defence, promoting the socialist literary critic Kurt Tucholsky to comment that “the trial dilutes blood to lemonade. If Grosz didn’t mean it like that, we did”.
Despite the restrictions and international hostilities imposed by World War I, Dada was a dynamically nomadic movement, with centres in New York, Paris, Cologne, Hanover, Barcelona and Tokyo. Through the friendships of individuals, it had loose affiliations with Merz, De Stijl and Constructivism. Its intellectual legacy, documented in numerous journals, manifestos and memoirs, is directly linked to travel, either voluntary or enforced through exile.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION? EXPERIMENTS OF THE 1960S AND 1970S

One has indeed to come to the end of the world, and for me at least to Africa, to find the most ancient, the most archaic things and also – surprisingly though it may seem – the most up-to-date, the most extraordinary things which were dreamt of forty or thirty years ago and are now becoming a reality on this soil of Africa…this new world, which is in a state of ferment…is clearly going to be the world of the future. Tristan Tzara, after visiting Zimbabwe and Mozambique, 1962

Neo-Dada is a term used to describe an eclectic range of work made between 1958 and 1962 in the USA and Europe. Bracketed by Abstract Expressionism on the one side of history and Pop Art on the other, the range of practices and strategies grouped under ‘Neo-Dada’ were too broad to be easily categorised. Some artists rejected the term outright, while others acknowledged the clear links to Dada by embracing process, chance, and a fundamental disregard for the disciplinary categories under which art is traditionally grouped. The various groupings associated with Neo-Dada, such as New Realism, Fluxus, the Situationist International and Happenings - would set the terms for Conceptual Art, Minimalism, performance art and feminist strategies in later art, in South Africa and internationally.

I don’t remember the term ‘Neo-Dada’ being used by anybody. I mean I’ve probably just forgotten or blocked it out, because I see it’s used over and over again. I must have known about it, and I probably reacted against it. Any artist would react against an attempt to take a label from the past and put it on what they’re doing. Claus Oldenburg in conversation with Susan Hapgood, 1993

In 1917, the year after the Cabaret Voltaire was established in Zürich, Marcel Duchamp entered a porcelain urinal into the Independent Artists’ exhibition in New York under the assumed name of Richard Mutt. Being a member of the jury himself, Duchamp’s gesture was to test the limits of this so-called ‘independence’. The rejection of the work was documented in an issue of the New York Dada journal, The Blind Man. It was a turning point in the history of modern art: art was now a matter of declaration, rather than discrimination. Anything could be art, if it was declared so.

With the renewed interest in Dada in the 1960s, artists like Duchamp and Man Ray created authorised editions of iconic early works. Man Ray’s first readymade, Cadeau (1921/1970), an object complicated by its ‘adoption’ by Surrealism, was reproduced as an edition of 5000 in 1970.

Duchamp’s influence in modern and contemporary art is definitive and pervasive. The Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased a 1968 edition of his Boîte (Series G) in 1996. The work functions as a portable museum; containing detailed miniature reproductions of his works; including paintings, readymades and other conceptual pieces.

Along with the combined eroticism and esotericism of Duchamp, Neo-Dada provoked renewed scrutiny of the formalist assemblages of Kurt Schwitters and Dada’s commitment to direct action. Yves Klein’s iconic image Leap into the Void (1960) captures this for a new generation. Recalling Dada’s playful absurdity, this carefully orchestrated photomontage is also a humorous indictment of photography’s supposed ‘truthfulness’.

Christo Coetzee left South Africa in 1951 to study abroad. His experimentation with assemblage painting began as early as 1956 in London. His Celestial Bicycle (1958/1960) was made in Paris; prior to the year he spent in Japan, where he was associated with the avant-garde Gutai group. Firmly situated within Neo-Dada trends of the time, he had a two-man show with Lucio Fontana (Paris, 1959) and was included on The Art of Assemblage (1961) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, alongside Duchamp, Schwitters, Daniel Spoerri, and others.

Deep conservatism and censorial authorities dominated apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Independent literary journals of the time demonstrated strong links between politically conscious artists and writers. Wopko Jensma, a prolific printmaker and poet, had links with many of these journals, including Ophir, Contrast, Wurm, and Snarl. Jensma’s concrete poetry recalls the work of Dadaist Theo van Doesburg, who published under the name of I.K. Bonset.

They had an exhibition of Dada art in London recently and they said that the punk people visiting the exhibition fitted in perfectly. How could one have known during Dada that punk and Dada would have come together so well? Walter Battiss, 1979

Exposure to the work of international artists and experimental practices took place mainly within urban art institutions (attended by predominantly privileged, white students) through influential teachers such as Kevin Atkinson, Walter Battiss, Willem Boshoff and Neville Dubow. Opportunities to travel to international exhibitions were invaluable sources of information on contemporary ideas, especially for Battiss, who maintained a friendly correspondence with Daniel Spoerri.

Art’s relationship to revolutionary and totalitarian politics, focusing particularly on Dada and Weimar Germany, formed the core of Dubow’s syllabus, these were subjects he felt appropriate for 1970s apartheid South Africa. For Willem Boshoff, it was imperative to introduce “a contemporary state of art” into his course. “If you were a doctor and prescribed medicine that was 100 years old, you would probably kill your patients”, he notes. Boshoff focused on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi as well as Jean Tinguely, whose language of “deformity and destruction” he regarded as instructive.

Tinguely visited Pretoria in 1970, as a fan of the Grand Prix. He arranged to use the facilities at the Pretoria College for Advanced Technical Education (where Malcolm Payne was a student) to make a sculpture as a gift for Swiss friends who lived nearby. Risking his final art history exam, Payne made a 16mm film of Tinguely at work on the sculpture. This film makes its first public appearance on Dada South?.

In Kevin Atkinson, an interest in ‘systems art’ informed a prolific career of painting, printmaking and experimental performance; where process becomes a means of spiritual self-realisation. Needing to disguise obvious political opposition for fear of censure, the imaginary Fook Island of Walter Battiss and Norman Catherine represents a poetic refuge for creative and personal freedom.

THE BODY OF THE VOICE

There is no language any more. It has to be invented all over again. Hugo Ball, 1927

The role of language in society is fundamental and structural; expressing ideas about subjectivity and power. Dada’s experimentation with the written, printed and spoken word sought to undermine the more oppressive and exclusionary powers of language by ‘freeing’ it from conventional use and emphasizing its visual forms.

Random combinations of letters suggest sounds and rhythms rather than meaning. Raoul Hausmann described this as ‘optophonetics’ – an optical impression of a sound. Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg harnessed this strategy in their development of ‘concrete’ poetry, taken further by the Lettrists in the 1940s.

In concrete poetry, the visual form of the poem – its shape and typography – echoes the ideas it contains. Willem Boshoff’s Kykafrikaans (1976-1980) is greatly informed by optophonetics, a strategy also used by Wopko Jensma.

Candice Breitz interferes with the narrative flow of a novel, by deleting words the way a censor would. The gaps she creates open up the possibility of another narrative ‘hidden’ within the main story, which emerges as a provocative impression made up of text fragments.

The concept of ‘performativity’ emphasises the ability of language to produce, rather than simply describe, an experience of reality. Performativity is an idea derived from linguistics, and closely associated with theatre practice. Theorist Judith Butler has applied the concept to her thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and society, including gender development and politics.

In Julia Rosa Clark’s Modernist Posters (2007), she creates clear stylistic references to the design and typography of early modernist avant-garde design. She cuts verbal declarations and lyrics from pop songs and collages them together in a manner that finds visual form for the emotional register of each scenario.

Interfering with the ‘sense’ of language creates new forms in the non-linear operations of digital media. Aesthetic experience is increasingly a matter of participation. In Nathaniel Stern’s Stuttering (2003), the work is activated by human presence. The piece ‘speaks back’ to you, depending on the gestures you make and where these gestures are situated in the projected field.

101% TENSE

The 1980s in South Africa were characterised by despair, terror and anger. ‘Security’ forces attempted to quash increasingly aggressive political resistance. Some chose exile; for others it was a matter of life or death. The fine balance that artists had to strike between freedom of expression and self-censorship became ever more treacherous. In the words of experimental Afrikaans band Koos, South Africa was “een honderd en een persent bang” (101% scared).

The political thrust of Berlin Dada and New Objectivity was an important reference for South African artists, who observed the tragic history of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany repeating itself in South Africa. Some used the figure of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King (1896) as a metaphor for an absurd abuse of power.

Ivor Powell: Grosz – or was it the Herzefeldes – put out a magazine, I forget the name of it. Every single edition of this magazine was separately banned. There’s a kind of sublime defiance in that, in continuing to publish the magazine…it seems that, especially at the time of Berlin Dada, defiance came to represent a way of life, an aesthetic in itself. Defiance at every level – this in contradistinction to Paris Dada, which never really broke out of a concern with art…[D]oes this attitude on the part of the Weimar artists, interest or excite you in terms of its possibilities as a way of life?

Robert Hodgins: The negative side of it is that the Surrealists – in spite of the fact that they seemed to be doing “outrageous” things, were always backed by a very respectable avant-garde side of the aristocracy… They were never really at risk. Now that kind of public didn’t exist in Berlin. What you had in Berlin was the fact that there was really only one ruling class and that was the military. Ivor Powell in conversation with Robert Hodgins, 1984

The Berlin Dada legacy of Hannah Höch, along with that of John Heartfield, is clearly evident in the work of Jane Alexander. A decade later, Candice Breitz applied similar strategies in her early photomontages that asked tough questions about the perceived ‘norms’ of representing women not as individual subjects, but as a collection of fragmented, objectified and fetishized body parts.

Assemblage (collage’s three-dimensional equivalent and a popular Neo-Dada medium) was a medium for artists who either could not afford expensive materials, or for whom the materials of art needed to reflect the climate in which they were being produced. Lucas Seage’s early assemblage sculptures, which are powerfully evocative of the abject lives of an oppressed black working class (see Coffin of the Migrant Worker, n.d.), earned him a scholarship to study with Joseph Beuys in Germany in 1981. Billy Mandindi’s Fire Games (1985) and Willie Bester’s The Soldier (1990) mirror the violence of the late 1980s in an uncompromising way.

In a society where every aspect of the personal was politicised – including sexuality, fashion, belief systems and relationships – the political underground had a cultural equivalent. From the late 1970s the rebel yell of punk music was an expressive outlet for a generation of white, middle-class youth who were gatvol of Apartheid’s injustices and facing military conscription. Collectivism took root in theatre, experimental performances, poster and mural co-operatives. ‘Alternative’ communities were formed in clubs and bars. Personal expression found form through music and cheaply produced ‘zines.

Possession Arts was a performance art collective that operated in Johannesburg in the early 1980s, echoing earlier initiatives like the Glass Theatre and the Space Theatre. A loose affiliation of artists driven largely by Ivor Powell and John Nankin, incendiary and short-lived, Possession staged multimedia performances at various locations, from laboratory theatres to Powell’s empty rental apartment.

Is jy ‘n moegoe / Of is jy ‘n ou
Is jy ‘n stukkie / Of is jy ‘n vrou
Are you gone / Or are you come
Are you many / Or only some
Koos, 1989

Me and Gys and Megan and Christo came from the theatre. Neil and Kendell were artists. Velile was his own man. We wanted poets to be heard and that’s why we made a hell of a noise. We didn’t want to rock. We wanted to commit murder, be unconscious. Preferably naked. To ignite the world with words. It was urgent. It was more important than anything else. We never talked politics. The political situation was obvious…We didn’t want to reason with them; we wanted to dance a twisted line. Marcel van Heerden on Koos, 2009

At the intersection of experimental music, art and democratic transition stood Neil Goedhals; a reserved individual whose premature death in 1990 cut short an influential, albeit short, career. Guitarist for Koos and the band’s de facto musical director, Goedhals produced a large body of experimental paintings that suggest a deep interest in the alchemical implications of formalism.

NEW FREEDOMS?

As South Africa was welcomed back into the international community, the mix of tension, optimism and insecurity was a breeding ground for new creative strategies. Video, photography, installation and digital arts gained prominence. Drawing on knowledge of recent and past histories, artists worked both individually and collaboratively to critique personal, political and creative apathy. Wayne Barker’s later FIG initiative (c. 1989) and Siemon Allen’s FLAT International (1993‒95) benefitted from the space for experimentation that groups like Koos and Possession embodied.

Apartheid’s toxic legacies continue to be processed through various creative strategies. In the early 1990s, Kendell Geers introduced ‘aesthetic terrorist’ tactics. His mode of working is indebted to The Situationist International; recoded to respond to local conditions, with global perspective. Radical reappraisals of the representation of race and gender, from a post-colonial persepctive, are evident in the work of Belinda Blignaut, Michael MacGarry and Athi-Patra Ruga.

The millennial turn produced its own anxieties that uncannily echo Dada’s formative years; a generation for whom society’s corruption and exhaustion seem a golden opportunity to rethink our priorities anew. Does the collapse of capitalism mark a return to ideas and an understanding of the political imperatives of art? Christian Nerf and Douglas Gimberg, in collaboration with each other and occasionally Barend de Wet, engage these questions in ways that precisely echo Dada’s complete integration of art and life, risk and play. Dada represented freedom. It opened art up to the everyday. We are its beneficiaries, but what will we continue to make of this opportunity, nearly a century later?

SOURCES

Kevin Atkinson. Exhibition pamphlet, University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery, 1978
Ballot, M. Christo Coetzee. Human & Rousseau, 1999
Bätzner, N. Faites Vos Jeux! Kunst und Spiel Seit Dada. Hatje Cantz, 2005
Bolliger, H, et al. Dada in Zürich. Kunsthaus Zürich/Arche Verlag, 1985
Boshoff, W. Word Forms and Language Shapes. Standard Bank Gallery, 2007
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Dachy, M. Archives Dada Chronique. Éditions Hazan, 2005
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Dickerman, L and Witkovsky, M. (eds) The Dada Seminars. National Gallery of Art/Distributed Art Publishers, 2005
Gardiner, M. South African Literary Magazines 1956–1978. Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, 2004
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Green, M. (ed) The Dada Almanac. Atlas Press, 1993
Hapgood, S. Neo-Dada: Redefining 1958–62. American Federation of Arts/Universe Publishing, 1994
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Jensma, W. I must show you my clippings. Ravan Press, 1977
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Koos! One-F Music, 2009
Powell, I. ‘“One of my own fragments”: An Interview with Robert Hodgins’. In de arte 31, September 1984, pp. 36-45
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Proud, Hayden. ‘Neville’s Notions’. Art South Africa, vol. 07, issue 02, Summer 2008, pp. 80-83
Meyer, R, et al. Dada global. Kunsthaus Zürich/Limmat Verlag, 1994
Motherwell, R. (ed) The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Belknap/Harvard, 1989
Sandqvist, T. Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. MIT Press, 2006
Smith, K. ‘An accidental situationist, or what happened when Battiss thought out loud’. In Skawran, K. Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist. Standard Bank Gallery, 2005
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EXHIBITION CREDITS

Dada South? Exploring Dada legacies in South African art, 1960 to the present
Curated by Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith with Lerato Bereng
Iziko South African National Gallery
12.12.2009–28.02.2010
Opening address by Lesego Rampolokeng
Opening evening performances by Brendon Bussy and the Riempie Vasmaak group collective (Garth Erasmus, Niklas Zimmer and Manfred Zylla), Donna Kukama, Julia Raynham, Lesego Rampolokeng, Warrick Sony, Mbali Vilakazi and Kemang wa Lehulere.

Dada South? is presented by the Goethe-Institut Südafrika and Pro Helvetia, with the additional support of BHP Billiton; Culturesfrance; educentric; the Embassy of France in South Africa; the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Stellenbosch; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; Institut Française d’Afrique du Sud; Iziko South African National Gallery; Jack Wellsted & Co., Mondriaan Foundation; National Arts Council of South Africa; serialworks; and generous private donors.

Media design strategy and Exhibition Guide production: serialworks
Research assistant: Francis Burger
Translation of exhibition texts: Bohle Conference and Language Services
Translation of Dada statements: Barend de Wet and Unathi Sigenu
Copy-editing: Ryan van Huyssteen
Installation designer and carpenter: Douglas Gimberg
Installation technicians: Denzel Deacon and Kelly Gough
Assistants: Stuart Buttle, Anja de Klerk, Lyn Siebörger, Dawie van Vuuren and Niklas Zimmer
Specialist book sales and orders: The Book Lounge


IZIKO SANG
Project manager: Andrea Lewis, Assistant Curator of Modern Paintings and Sculpture
Curator of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture: Nadja Daehnke
Collections Manager: Robyn-Leigh Cedras
Assistant Collections Manager: Nigel Scholtz
Conservator: Angela Zehnder
Workshop: William Visagie and Majiet Isaacs

Visiting conservators: Nina Bingel (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen); Andreas Piel (Berlinische Galerie); Jean Rosston (Kunsthaus Zürich)

Lenders to the exhibition

Berlinische Galerie, Landes Museum Berlin; BHP Billiton; Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne Collections, Paris; De Stijl Archives, Netherlands Institute for Art History, Den Haag; Goethe-Institut Collection, Munich; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; Iziko South African National Gallery; Johannesburg Art Gallery; John Heartfield Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Kunstgewerbesammlung; Sasol Museum, University of Stellenbosch; Wits Art Galleries; and numerous private collections and galleries.

All text © educentric