Adam Pendleton's Black Dada Manifesto and Reader Launch at KW Berlin

Adam Pendleton performed his 'Black Dada Manifesto' (2008) in the courtyard of Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art to launch the Black Dada Reader and his exhibition 'shot him in the face'. The reader compiles foundational texts, essays, and positions by other artists assembled by Pendleton to map his concept of Black Dada. The exhibition takes its starting point from Ron Silliman's poem 'Albany' (1946), superimposing fragments of its opening line across a wall that bisects the room, overlaying images of the first Documenta, independence celebrations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a Dada event in Zürich, and a page by Malcolm X. On the backside, a Black Dada painting is offset by a 1966 red monochrome by Ian Wilson. Pendleton's series, begun in 2008, crops Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cube (1974) onto black screen-prints with letters from 'Black Dada', a term he found in a poem by Amiri Baraka. The reader includes voices such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Luc Godard, Gertrude Stein, June Jordan, Sun Ra, Thomas Hirschhorn, Joan Jonas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Adrian Piper. Pendleton positions Black Dada ambivalently with and against modern art history, as both ally and disruption.