Opening: 5 June 2026, 18:00 – with a performance by Katalin Ladik
«Dada» is a word that belongs to no particular language. When it was proclaimed the name of the new avant-garde movement at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, it already exemplified a liberated experimentation in, with, and between different languages. What does «Dada» mean? The answers are as diverse as the many linguistic experiments performed at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich’s Niederdorf from 5 February to early summer 1916. Sound and simultaneous poems were recited, animal voices imitated. The propaganda language of the First World War was turned upside down; the experiential backgrounds of migration, violence, and precarity were translated into verses with and without words. What was voiced? What was overlooked, unheard, unread? What can we still know today? In fact, no audio or film recordings of the 1916 performances at Cabaret Voltaire exist. All existing recordings date from later periods, some made by the aging Dadaists themselves.
The exhibition «DadaZwischenSprachen» (DadaBetweenLanguages) shows, through selected exhibits from 1916 and accompanying documents, how Dadaist language experiments nonetheless materialised: in prints and reports, in drafts, scores, and sketches, later in manifestos, as well as in subsequent reworkings or allusions. The exhibition also highlights the gaps that emerged in the transmission history of early Dada impulses: What happened to the voices of women? What to the appropriated sources from other cultures? It further demonstrates the — often interrupted — continuations that the initial multilingual and interlingual Dada expressions found in later times: far beyond Zurich and up to the present day. Dada is still travelling between languages. Continuations as well as critical developments can be found not only in literature, but also in performance art, pop culture, social critique, and current debates on the relationship between technology, art, economy, and ways of life.
Alongside historical documents, works from the post-war period to the present connect with those impulses. In an accompanying programme, the impulses of the exhibition will be further developed in dialogue with the public.
Contributors (Selection): Katalin Ladik, Babi Badalov, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Marietta di Monaco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Maria d'Arezzo, Friedrich Glauser, Blaise Cendrars, Lina Lapelytė, Thomas Hirschhorn, Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Ladislav Novák, Ewa Partum, Yello, Talking Heads.
The exhibition and accompanying programme are the result of a collaboration between the University of Zurich (Prof. Dr Sandro Zanetti, Department of Romance Studies, Division of General and Comparative Literary Studies) and Cabaret Voltaire (Salome Hohl), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Agora project «Dada between Languages»). Contributors include Prof. Dr Tomáš Glanc (University of Zurich, Institute of Slavic and East European Studies) and Monica Unser (Cabaret Voltaire).
