TIRANA, Sept. 29 – Dadaists from all over the world have come together in Tirana to mark 100th years of Dadaism, a European artistic and literary movement that flouted conventional aesthetics and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty and incongruity.
Some 30 artists from 16 countries have been engaged in dance, music, song, projection and taboo breaking performances at the Cloud pavilion installation in Tirana by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto in this year’s edition of the Poeteka poetry festival dedicated to Dadaism.
“Dadaism did not come to Albania because the whole of Albania is a DADA of its own kind and for this reason it has not allowed and will not allow to be rivalled,” organizers say.
“Albania is a unique case in Europe if we consider that not one but two kinds of atheism were applied on its citizens: the religious ‘atheism and atheism against modern art and its prophets,” says poet Arjan Leka, the founder of the Poeteka festival.
“Albania was and maybe remains Europe’s most ‘Dadaistic’ country. War, rebellion, revolt and anarchy against institutions and values but not against those responsible for the violation of freedom and human values,” says Leka.
“This country, so surrealistic that it persecuted freedom of thought, eliminated private property, banned every wave and signal coming from the West and imprisoned and killed poets who read, wrote and translated modern poetry is today that Dada in its philosophy, intentionally skeptical, negativist, nihilist, able to provoke instinct but not thinking,” he adds.
Israeli’s Dror Liberman, Bosnia’s Lejla Kalamujić, Macedonia’s Elena Prendjova, Kosovo’s Alban Fejza, Albania’s Sabina Veizaj and Eljan Tanini are some of the artists participating in POETEKA – dadaEAST – dadaDAYS which closes on Friday, Sept. 30.
Dada, whose roots are in Switzerland, had far-reaching effects on the art of the 20th century. Its nihilistic, antirationalistic critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on all formal artistic conventions found no immediate inheritors, but its preoccupation with the bizarre, the irrational, and the fantastic bore fruit in the Surrealist movement. Critics have even cited Dadaist influences on the punk rock movement of the 1970s.
