On the Absurd Drama That Is Also Life

Curator: Andreas Nilsson
Exhibition design: Laura Kaminskaitė

When Hugo Ball was carried on stage at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the summer of 1916, the Absurd made its entrance on the art scene, liberating it with humour and provocation. The exhibition On the Absurd Drama That Is Also Life at Moderna Museet Malmö embraces the legacy of Dadaism through works by contemporary artists, new commissions and key works from the Moderna Museet Collection from 1916 up to the present. The contemporary works are in dialogue with artists such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Man Ray, Dorothéa Tanning, Tetsumi Kudo, Joan Jonas and Enrico Baj. The exhibition, curated by Andreas Nilsson, incorporates a wide range of techniques with a special focus on works related to drama and theatre.

The Dada movement coincided with the rise of cinema and Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedies which align with the humorous side of the absurd that is explored in the film works on view by René Clair and Samson Kambalu.

For the project The Idiots (2024), Kira Nova collaborated with sound and installation artist Ignas Krunglevičius, and worked with clowns and actors, drawing from her own experience being active as a clown as a teenager. Through a Dadaist sense of humour, socially rigid structures are liberated, and expectations are overturned, a “contagious levity arises” as Nilsson writes in his catalogue essay, in line with Francis Picabia, who wrote that it “respects nothing except the right to roar with laughter” about René Clair’s debut film Entr’acte (1924).

Acting behind a costume, a mask or a puppet is a crucial part of Dada as well as in the performative practices we encounter in the exhibition. Karl Dunér works in the borderland of theatre and art, and just like in Samuel Becket’s plays, it’s the everyday movements and non-events that take centre stage in his Company I (1997), made in collaboration with artist and scenographer Peder Freiij. Filip Vest instead takes the space behind the stage as a focus in Self-Tape (2024), and the aspiring actor’s preparation before casting. Sometimes in the role of the monster, sometimes in the role of the princess.

On another note, works by Monster Chetwynd, Kris Lemsalu, Johanna Ulfsak and Jenny Kalliokulju favour an extroverted method, where life and art seamlessly merge. Kalliokulju’s new work MAMAN or THE TONGUE (2024), which captures the cycles of everyday life and motherhood, includes large-scale painting and sculpture and culminates in an opera performance in February 2025. Referring to himself as “a fisherman of social absurdity”, Pope.L moved between theatre, performance and visual art. His work criticised a culture and a society consumed and divided by inequitable conditions. In Pope.L’s work, language be­comes almost physical—a flow of words being given shape and form. And the credibility with which the monologue in Eracism, version 8B, (1992-2002) is performed highlights the absurd grey area between theatre and life that the artist seems to be well aware of.

Together, the artists in the exhibition draw attention to the theatre of life’s incomprehensibility on the stage of the everyday that surrounds it. They combine a subtle resistance with a quest for freedom. The exhibition title On the Absurd Drama That Is Also Life alludes to the theatre of the absurd, a term that the playwright and producer Martin Esslin coined in his eponymous book from the beginning of the 1960s. Like several of the dramatists whom Esslin is referring to such as Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Harold Pinter, many of the participating artists in this exhibition work with an open non-narrative plot. Form and matter interact in a poetically open aesthetic, as T. S. Eliot wrote, the end is in the beginning.

The exhibition design has been created in collaboration with artist Laura Kaminskaitė, who also contributes works to the exhibition. A programme of performance, theatre and opera accompanies the exhibition together with a publication.

Press contact
Alexandra Giertz, a.giertz [​at​] modernamuseet.se
Moderna Museet Malmö

Programme during the exhibition period  
Performance
September 27 and 28, 2024: Monster Chetwynd, Evolution of Cat People
October 25, 2024 (Vernissage): Kris Lemsalu. In collaboration with IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts.
November 7, 2024: Filip Vest, Self Tape
Theatre
November 28 and 29, 2024: Karl Dunér, PING, and SKULLS
Opera
February 8 and 9, 2025: Jenny Kalliokulju, MAMAN or THE TONGUE

Participating artists: Monster Chetwynd, Karl Dunér, Jenny Kalliokulju, Samson Kambalu, Laura Kaminskaitė, Pope.L, Kris Lemsalu & Johanna Ulfsak, Kira Nova & Ignas Krunglevičius, Filip Vest
From the Moderna Museet Collection: Eva Aeppli, Enrico Baj, Marcel Broodthaers, René Clair, Karl Dunér & Peder Freiij, Robert Gober, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Joan Jonas, Greta Knutson-Tzara, Tetsumi Kudo, Kris Lemsalu, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marion Scemama, Dorothéa Tanning, as well as documentation by Hugo Ball, Tetsumi Kudo, Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Moderna Museet exhibition catalogue 428 published in conjunction with the exhibition
Editor: Andreas Nilsson
Texts by: Elisabeth Millqvist, Andreas Nilsson, Jenny Kalliokulju
Graphic design: Varv Varv
Published by Moderna Museet and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln

Supported by
Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden
OCA—Office for Contemporary Art Norway
In collaboration with Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, with support from the Lithuanian Cultural Institute

Moderna Museet Malmö is part of the state-owned Moderna Museet and is funded by the City of Malmö, Region Skåne, and the Swedish government.