Viewed across time and place, this quality has manifested in group exhibitions and demonstrations, cowritten manifestos and declarations, and broadly shared and circulated values.Ĭollaborative pursuits could release what Simone Breton, an early participant in Surrealism in Paris, called “images unimaginable by one mind alone.” Examples of such generative activities include seánce-like explorations of trances by Breton and her colleagues, questionnaires published in the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s journal, and the Chicago Surrealists’ spoken-word poetry performed with musicians. Surrealism depends upon a collective body committed to going beyond what can be done by the individual in isolation, often in response to political or social concerns. Neither singular in narrative nor linear in chronology, the exhibition pushes beyond traditional borders and conventional narratives to draw a map of the world in the time of the Surrealists as an interrelated network-one that makes visible many lives, locations, and encounters linked through the freedom and possibility offered by Surrealism. They reveal collective interests shared by artists across regions points of convergence, relay, and exchange individual challenges witnessed over the last hundred years in the pursuit of independence from colonialism and the experience of exile and displacement wrought by international conflict. The artworks assembled here from around the world animate some of the myriad routes into and through Surrealism. Its scope has always been transnational, exceeding national borders as a unified call for liberation, while also taking on specific and local conditions. It refers not to a historical moment but to a movement in the truest sense inherently dynamic, it has traveled and evolved from place to place and time to time, and continues to do so today. Surrealism is an expansive, shifting term, but at its core, it is an interrogation. While Surrealism has generated poetic and even humorous works, it has also been deployed by artists around the world as a tool in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedoms. These are images commonly associated with Surrealism, a revolutionary idea sparked in Paris around 1924 that prioritized the unconscious and dreams over the familiar and everyday. A miniature train rushes from a fireplace. A telephone receiver morphs into a lobster.
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