Ambra D’Antone

“Translating Modernity: Surrealism of the Levant”

Supervisors: Prof Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Matthew Gale (Tate Modern)

Funded by Arts & Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award

This dissertation is the first analysis in English entirely dedicated to Surrealism in the area of Greater Syria and Turkey between 1920s-1960s, an area which I refer to as the Levant: I understand the Levant as a historical region united by shared artistic and cultural legacies, while it is geographically and ideologically divided by ethnic and nationalist discourses. Through archival research and historical analysis,  I uncover significant and still largely unacknowledged Surrealist productions in this region, and I argue that Levantine artists developed a sophisticated Surrealist vocabulary through a complex act of translation of the dispositions towards modernity that Surrealism espoused and engendered in its ongoing evolutions.

By means of key case studies, I show that Surrealism equipped artists in the Levant with tools for disrupting established models of knowledge and of art production in search of alternative epistemic criteria. Crucial to my work is an investigation of how the reconfiguration of knowledge in the region by means of Surrealist strategies and by the mining of local artistic heritage, as it informed modern art practices, allowed artists to account for experiences of the modern that did not necessarily fall in step with discourses of Euro-American progress. These experiences force us to rethink the ontology of Surrealism’s international profile, and to destabilise some of the narratives that have characterised modernity in art historical discourses thus far.