“The hours that hold the figure and the form
Have run their course within the house of dream.”
– Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1928)

A week-long intensive in the Reading Room sees curators Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk unpack an archive of material accumulated during the research and design of Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance at Iziko South African National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. This historic exhibition hosted Dada artworks from international collections in Berlin, Paris and Zürich, alongside an extensive selection of works by local artists from the 1960s to 2010. Reviewing the exhibition’s archive after a 14-year interval asked for a conscientious attention to detail, openness to errantry and frank discussions about the values practitioners bring to the table in reconstructing the context and felt quality of the subject matter.

Situating this particular exhibition within broader enquiries into experimental arts practices by the curators and others (see selected bibliography below), it becomes evident that Dada is (to rephrase Benjamin) pivotal to understanding the role of the arts in broader philosophical critiques of modernity and its unequal and asymmetric distribution in colonial expansion and totalitarian regimes. What emerged during this workshop was a need to be particularly sensitive to how Dada’s double-edged strategy of enchantment and disenchantment relate to, reconfigure and/or amplify similar narratives in modernity as a whole.

In our attempts to wrestle life-affirming strategies like freedom of thought from the complex heritage of art locally and elsewhere, we need perhaps hold Dada’s twin legacies of utopianism and cynicism more lightly. Indeed, the Dadaists seemed always to be anticipating their own end, even as they reached for alternative ways of being and becoming.