Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi: Emmy Hennings

As a cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Emmy Hennings, with her partner, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, is recognized as having established and environment for collective experimentation. This book gathers an extensive collection of Hennings’s writings, ephemera, and art, to give shape to a practice and an individual so ofter flattened for the sake of art historical narrative. In the exhibitions held at Cabaret Voltaire and at the Swiss Institute in 2020, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi made evocative displays that created space for a deeper engagement with Hennings’s life and art. For this publication, she has made new collages, combining found materials and working tools such as adhesive strips, supplemented by graphic gestures and subjective indexes such as cigarette butts.

By bringing the Hennings archive into dialogue with her own work, Ghaznawi considers the manner in which an individual’s multiple identities guide the accumulation of personal experience, be they her own or those of a woman she never met. Commissioned on the occasion of her exhibitions, and published together here for the first time, are texts by Ghaznawi’s friends and collaborators Michael Zimmerman, Semuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Ser Serpas, Ian Woolridge, Olamiju Fajemisin, Shamiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov and Furqat Palvan-Zade.