Redesign and re-issue of Dada South exhibition guide produced in Cape Town, South Africa, by Kathryn Smith, Roger van Wyk, Christian Nerf & francis burger for Clare Butcher, March 2011.

Dada South? was curated by independent curators Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith, and presented at the Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) from December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. The exhibition comprised some 400 works in four spaces (rooms 7, 8, 9, 10), spanning the period 1916 to 2009, and drawn from public, private and corporate collections across South Africa, as well as collections in Zurich, Berlin, Paris and Den Haag. In many ways, the exhibition was precedent-setting, being the first time original Dada works were shown in South Africa and the first time the Pompidou Centre, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Zurich Museum of Design, Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Berlinische Galerie made major loans to the country.

For this publication, the curators made
an idiosyncratic selection of works, historical
data and anecdotes from the exhibition material, creating flight paths across people, time and space that shed light on invisible histories that the project sought to extract from scattered archives, memory and oral histories.

The focus in this guide is on one room, which presented works produced by South African artists between 1960 and 1980. This was the beginning of South Africa’s cultural isolation under apartheid, and artists who were able to travel and engage with international colleagues abroad were in the minority. These works were exhibited in relation to iconic works by artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, who reissued or re-presented works originally made during Dada’s historical moment after renewed international interest in Dada from the late 1950s onwards. Man Ray’s Obstruction, requested from several international collections, was unavailable, but considering Man Ray released an instructional drawing for the work’s construction, the curators assembled it themselves using similar cheap wooden coat hangers sourced from a local department store.

Duchamp’s Boîte (Series G), purchased by the Johannesburg Art Gallery
in 1996 and never loaned out from that museum, functioned as a central lens and filter for the exhibition, through which connections, misdirections and imagined possibilities could be located.