Surrealism and Ethnography in Paris, 1925 ff

In 1920s and 1930s France, the relatively late establishment of ethnology as an academic discipline in comparison to other colonial empires, the modernization of the ethnographic museum, and the commencement of collective fieldwork coincided with Surrealism, jazz and “negrophilia.” James Clifford coined the term “ethnographic Surrealism” to explain the correlations between Avant-Garde art and the questioning of “cultural orders” as well as those between rationality-critical discourse and references to non-Western cultures.
In a tour of the exhibition, Irene Albers illuminates the interconnections between Surrealism and ethnology in Paris between the World Wars. The focus is on the journal Documents, on whose editorial team Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris collaborated, and on the Dakar-Djibouti mission (1931-1933).

To the biography of Irene Albers