ART & BODY

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich as a reaction to the horrors and absurdity of the war. The art, poetry, and performance produced by Dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dada). While art history has traditionally focused on a small group of European male artists, the movement also included important women such as Emmy Hennings and Hannah Höch, who contributed through performance, collage, and experimental practices. Dada engaged visual arts, poetry, theatre, literature, graphic design, manifestos, and art theory, and was strongly anti-bourgeois and anti-war.

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The movement began around 1916, when artists gathered to discuss art and respond to the war, often meeting at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Some of the key figures included Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. 

Although there were no widely recognised Black artists within the core Dada groups, this reflects how the movement has been historically framed and documented; at the same time, Black artists such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and Beauford Delaney were developing parallel modernist practices that similarly challenged dominant culture and rethought the body, identity, and performance.