28. Creative Misreading: Dada, Proto-Dada, and Global Artistic ReinventioN

“Misreading” has a long history in literary studies, from Harold Bloom’s theory of creative misprision to reception theory’s emphasis on the reader’s role in producing meaning. In both cases, misreading is not simply an error, but a generative act. This session asks what creative misreading can mean for art history. Artistic concepts do not travel as complete or stable objects. They move through translations, reproductions, exhibitions, archives, teaching, criticism, and personal networks, often arriving in fragmented, delayed, or uneven forms. Misreading, in this sense, becomes a process of reconstruction, through which artists, critics, curators, and institutions adapt historical movements to new creative, political, and institutional contexts.

Dada offers a productive case for this question. Although often historicised through a short chronology beginning in Zurich in 1916, its receptions cannot be contained within a stable temporal or geographical frame. Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dada has been invoked, translated, exhibited, and reconfigured in relation to Fluxus, Happenings, institutional critique, performance, mail art, conceptual practice, Japanese Neo-Dada, and the Chinese avant-garde of the 1980s. What circulated was not a single Dada, but multiple constructions produced through uneven movements of texts, images, exhibitions, archives, networks, and local experiments.

The session welcomes papers on Dada, proto-Dada, Neo-Dada, and related experimental practices, especially those addressing translation, partial reception, publications, exhibitions, archives, pedagogy, artist networks, non-Western or socialist modernisms, and anti-art under different political and institutional conditions.

Themes: Global art history, modern and contemporary, reception history

Additional format comment: 4-6 speakers and a respondent.

Lead Convenor: Fengyi Guo, University of York, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Lu Bai, University of Regensburg, Germany

Hui Wang, Universität Heidelberg, Germany

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.