Surrealist Attitudes

A growing number of recent exhibitions and publications have tried to expand how we understand Surrealism. These have shown that beyond the longstanding Eurocentric framing, Surrealism, arguably more than any other Modernist movement, emerged from global encounters, as its main protagonists became disillusioned with the post-WWI world, believing that a different world was not just possible, but constructible.

This publication, and the exhibition it accompanies, aligns with these attempts to reorient how we understand Surrealism. Bringing selected works of art and material culture from across the world in the collections of the Wereldmuseum together with seminal works in Euro-American Surrealism from, among others, the world-renowned collections of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and the works of several Rotterdam artists, it reframes Surrealism as more than an art movement. Surrealism is taken as a global attitude and approach to the world, as a politics of dreaming of and for another, better world.

It engages with the multiple approaches to dreams and imagination, to inner and outer, human and spirit worlds, troubling distinctions between art and ethnographic objects, between the artist and the ethnographic subjects. The authors included here explore the worlds that have shaped, but also those shaped by, the plurality of Surrealist attitudes, Surrealisms, as artists and makers from across the world dreamed of other worlds.

This publication is part of the series, Global Modernisms, developed by the Wereldmuseum to rethink modernism from the perspective of the global majority.