Surrealism without borders

I suppose that when most of us think of surrealism, pictures of the lobster-shaped telephones and flying cats of Salvador Dali spring to mind. Those in the know, of course, will realise that the roots of the movement take us back to 1920s Paris. There are the famous names of the movement, such as André Breton, the man who defined surrealism in his Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, as well as the photographers we may know such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Brassaï and André Kertész. For the most part, people associate surrealism with a relatively small band of artists based in Europe, but an upcoming exhibition at Tate Modern intends to expand our appreciation a little more by exposing us to the pockets of surrealists that sprang up all around the globe and to the artists we may not know so well. It is easy to assume that surrealism happened in a room of about 20 artists in Paris, but Carine Harmand, one of the curators of the Surrealism Without Borders exhibition that’s showing until August, explains that surrealism was actually a network of artists that stretched around the globe.

A global network

‘This exhibition is an attempt to expand the understanding of surrealism,’ Carine tells us. ‘Surrealism is generally seen through a Paris-centred lens, but while André Breton was formulating surrealism as a force of personal, social and political liberation, other artists, writers and intellectuals in other places were thinking about the same things – such as