Sabotaging Reality. Surrealism in European Photographic Art, 1922–1947
Location: 2nd floor, Great Hall
The exhibition has been put together from the collections of the Pompidou Centre and the display includes more than 150 works displaying different photo techniques. Among the most celebrated artists, the exhibition includes works by Man Ray, Dora Maar, Brassaï, Eli Lotar and Claude Cahun. The aim of the exhibition is to go far beyond the celebrated members of different schools of surrealism, and to try to discover the surreal spirit that is expressed in the works of other artists who were more or less influenced by the surrealists in Paris, the spirit that can also be traced to Germany and England in the same era.
The essence of surrealism is the wish to destroy reality. In the 1920s and the 1930s, it took various forms, ranging from automatic writing to picture and word games, promoting opportunity, unexpectedness, the free range of imagination and investigating the subconscious. Bringing back the supernatural, ending the rule of reason, morality and logic, and creating art that does not meet a single moral or aesthetic requirement – these are some principles of surrealism.
Photographic art rather than painting is the domain where the sabotage of reality was most comprehensive and creative. André Breton saw real automatic writing in photographic art: photographs can be technically processed (e.g. by “burning” and deforming). In the case of photographs, it is possible to play with possible failures (e.g. photograms); they can be inverted and manipulated, or they can simply be photographed. As a result, photographic art became the favourite tool of surrealists, who pursued “the ever purer subconscious, which at the same time is more and more captivated by the cognitive world.”
Besides purely artistic works, the exhibition introduces photographs which were prepared for commercial purposes. These advertisements, fashion photographs and illustrations, which through avant-garde magazines and surreal statements spread the surreal spirit to the wider public in the 1930s, have been a significant support for photographic art.
Curator: Quentin Bajac (Centre Pompidou)
Designer: Andres Tolts
Co-ordinator: Ragne Nukk
Supporters:
Swedbank, French Embassy in Estonia, the French Cultural Centre in Tallinn, French presidency of the European Union
