9:16in productionCh. 1 · Zürich, 1916/ 9:16 · ceiling 15 min

Dada wasn’t art—it was a refusal signed in nonsense and stamped with a cabaret ticket.

Dada was an international art movement that developed in the context of World War I, its aftermath, and the Futurist movement. First established in Zürich, Switzerland, it later quickly spread to Berlin, Paris, New York City and a variety of artistic centers in Europe and Asia. The Dada movement's principles were first collected in Hugo Ball's Dada Manifesto in 1916. Dadaists worked across media, including sound poetry, collage and photomontage (especially in Berlin), and the use of found objects and assemblage. In New York and Paris, Marcel Duchamp's readymades became emblematic of Dada's anti‑art stance. Dadaists disagreed over whether the movement's acts of negation were primarily ends in themselves or means of clearing the ground for new forms of art and experience. Dada coalesced among émigré artists and writers in neutral Switzerland during 1916, with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founding the Cabaret Voltaire as a venue for nightly performances and manifestos. Participants framed their activity as a protest against war, nationalism, and cultural conformity, adopting strategies of nonsense, chance, and ridicule to negate prevailing aesthetic values.

Same beat · Movements & scenes4 of 166

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Fluxus1960Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community active during the 1960s and 1970s that emphasised chance-based process over the finished product, produced brief and simple performance events, used event scores as performance art scripts, and held anti-commercial and anti-art sensibilities. It originated in concepts explored by John Cage, was named by George Maciunas in 1961, and first publicly coined on 9 June 1962. It is sometimes described as intermedia and is interdisciplinary in discipline.

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DecadenceDecadence was a late-19th-century literary and aesthetic movement originating in France’s fin de siècle. It prized artifice over nature, sensation over morality, and extremity over utility. The label began as journalistic criticism—but was adopted by a minority of writers including Huysmans and Wilde. Its roots lie in Gothic fiction and Poe. Historians warn against uncritical use of the term due to its moral valence and contested objectivity.

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Cubism1907Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that began in Paris and flourished across the 1910s and 1920s. It involved analyzing, breaking up, and reassembling subjects in abstract form, depicting them from multiple perspectives rather than a single viewpoint. A major innovation was the introduction of collage in 1912. The movement is historically divided into phases—Analytic Cubism (1910–1912) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1914)—each marked by distinct formal strategies. It emerged from collaborative work in the studios of Picasso and Braque and rapidly expanded to include numerous artists across painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and design.

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Surrealism1920Surrealism was a revolutionary art and cultural movement originating in Europe after World War I, formally established in Paris in October 1924. It aimed to express the unconscious mind through dreamlike, illogical imagery, surprise, and unexpected juxtapositions — grounded in 'pure psychic automatism' as defined by André Breton. Its method prioritized philosophical experimentation over finished artworks, and it aligned politically with communism and anarchism.