Dada is the anti-art movement born in zurich in 1916 that responded to the carnage of world war i with absurdity, chance, and provocation.
Dada was founded in February 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich by exiles from a Europe at war: Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Jean Arp, and others. The movement took its nonsense name to signal a refusal of all the meanings the war had ridiculed. Dada manifested as cabaret performance, sound poetry, photomontage, collage, found objects, and chance-based composition. Marcel Duchamp's readymades — 'Bicycle Wheel' (1913), 'Fountain' (1917) — were absorbed into the Dada canon, though Duchamp had begun the work independently. Dada spread to Berlin (Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz), Hanover (Kurt Schwitters and his sustained 'Merz' project), Cologne (Max Ernst), Paris (Picabia, Tzara, the early Surrealists), and New York (Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia). By 1924 most of the European Dadaists had migrated into Surrealism, but Dada's strategies — chance, appropriation, anti-aesthetic provocation — reappeared in Fluxus, Pop Art, conceptual art, punk, and most of late 20th-century avant-garde practice.