Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by Hugo Ball with his companion Emmy Hennings, and in Berlin in 1917. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.
Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a short-lived nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland in 1916, revived in the 21st century. It was founded by Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings, in the back room of Holländische Meierei, Spiegelgasse 1, on February 5, 1916, as a cabaret intended for artistic and political purposes. Other founding members were Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp.
Jan Theiler alias Pastor Leumund is a German artist, musician and political activist.
Emmy Hennings was a German poet and performing artist, founder of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire with her second husband Hugo Ball.
Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator, artist, and art historian. Having curated more than 200 exhibitions, many of which have been characterized as groundbreaking, Szeemann is said to have helped redefine the role of an art curator. It is believed that Szeemann elevated curating to a legitimate art form itself.
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer.
Lennie Lee is a South African conceptual artist who lives and works in London.
The Kroesos Foundation is an artistic collective set up by Luxemburgese Artist Mark Divo. Between January and March 2002 they occupied the building in the centre of Zurich where the original European Dada movement began, as a response to the horrors of World War I, which came to be known as the Cabaret Voltaire. The collective organised a number of events/ performances over a period of three months until they were forced to leave the building. In spite of their eviction they managed to have the building turned into a museum. Members of the collective, apart from Divo, include Aiana Calugar, Dan Jones, Lennie Lee, ingo giezendanner and Pastor Leumund Cult. Throughout the winter of 2002 they were described as neo-Dadaists by the Swiss and international press. The group have exhibited in a number of international exhibitions including the real Biennale at the Kinský Palace in Prague.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were a Swiss artist duo that collaborated beginning in 1979. Their best-known work is the film Der Lauf der Dinge, described by The Guardian as being "post apocalyptic", as it concerned chain reactions and the ways in which objects flew, crashed and exploded across the studio in which it was shot. Fischli lives and works in Zürich; Weiss died on 27 April 2012.
Arthur Segal was a Romanian artist and author.
Urs Fischer is a Swiss-born contemporary visual artist living in New York City and Los Angeles. Fischer’s practice includes sculpture, installation, photography, and digitally-mediated images.
Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker. He is a leading name in the Transvanguardia artistic movement and one of the many European artists to revive Expressionism in the 1980s.
Countess Adelina von Fürstenberg-Herdringen is a Swiss curator specialized in contemporary art. Von Fürstenberg was one of the first curators to show an interest in non-European artists, thus opening the way for a multicultural approach in art. She also took a more global and flexible approach to contemporary art exhibitions, in bringing art into spaces such as monasteries, madrasas, large public buildings, squares, islands, and parks. Her objective is to give a larger context for visual art in making it a more vigorous part of our lives, in creating a more vivid dialogue for it with other arts, and relating it more to worldwide social issues.
Leah Dickerman is the director of research programs at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She was formerly director of editorial & content strategy at MoMA. Serving previously as the museum’s first Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, a post endowed in 2015, Dickerman previously held the positions of curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA (2008–2015), acting head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington, D.C. (2007), and associate curator in modern and contemporary art at the NGA (2001–2007). Over the course of her career, Dickerman has organized or co-organized a series of exhibitions including One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Works (2015), Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 (2012–2013), Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (2011–2012), Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity (2009–2010), Dada (2005–2006), and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1998).
Pavel Pepperstein is a Russian artist and writer.
Hugo Markl is a contemporary American artist, curator, and creative director. He studied Visual communication at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (1985–90) where he graduated with an M.A. in fine arts. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, video, drawing, printmaking, installation art, and performance. Markl lives in New York City.
Kris Lemsalu is a contemporary artist based in Tallinn, Estonia and Vienna, Austria. She studied art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Eccentric with color and material, she uses props, costumes, and other natural materials to portray her artwork. In these installations, Lemsalu sculpts an installation that "gives birth to a world of shamanic force, visionary weirdness, and collective revival." By playing with traditions, Lemsalu blurs the origin and scenically removes their dogma. She avoids "concrete labeling, simultaneously showing us the absurdity of as well as the effectiveness of rituals. From this collective transformative euphoria emerges a belief in the possibility of human redemption." "A punk pagan trickster feminist sci-fi shaman, Kris Lemsalu gathers together both collected and crafted objects into totemic sculptures and hallucinatory environments, animated with performances by the artist and her coterie of collaborators;" her work being shown in many places, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Tokyo. In 2015, she participated in Frieze Art Fair New York, where her work Whole Alone 2 was selected among of five best exhibits by the Frieze New York jury.
Cathérine Hug is a Swiss art historian and curator.
Marcel Słodki was a Polish painter, graphic artist and stage designer. He was post-impressionist associated with the dadaist movement. He died during World War II, after being arrested in France and sent to the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp c. 1943–1944.
