Dada Exhibitions

Modernism · c. 1916–1924

Anti-art, absurdism, protest

Born in wartime Zurich as a deliberate assault on reason, art, and bourgeois values. Duchamp declared that a urinal was art; Hannah Höch cut up newspapers into surreal photomontages; Tzara wrote poetry by pulling words from a hat. Dada asked whether art had any meaning in a world that had just produced industrialised slaughter — and refused to answer.