Disabled artists have resuscitated the principles of an almost-forgotten socio-political art movement in a bid for visibility within the occasionally elitist art world. You didn’t know it, but Dada is alive and well and based in South East England.
Dada, or Dadaism, was originally a loose, collectivised counterculture of “anti-art” actions and aesthetics of the 1910s and 20s, which pitted itself against the exclusive and bourgeois art establishment. The Dada of the South East, on the other hand, is a pioneering organisation with a vision and a mission, not to mention a killer acronym. The Disability Arts Development Agency cites part of the original Dada manifesto on their website as a call to arms, as a statement, and as an expression of their strategy:
