If you're keen on the Surrealist art movement and you're searching for an up to date and high quality book on the subject (the Surrealist art movement, not 'surrealism'), well, you can stop looking. Archive of Dreams: A Surrealist Impulse marks the hundredth anniversary of the first surrealist manifesto and the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in 1924. It's a quite romp through the scene and also accompanies the exhibition of the same name that will open the Archiv der Avantgarden (Archive of the Avantgarde) in Dresden in 2024.
Archive of Dreams is dedicated to the surrealist movement as well as the networks it engendered and the artistic stimuli it provided in the twentieth century. The idea was for the Bureau to collect dream testimonies in whatever form, not only to preserve and analyse them but also to give active expression to them in artistic processes. The publication shows how avant garde practices and methodologies blurred the boundaries between dream and reality, between the traditional, passive notion of the archive and the idea of active, innovative artistic experiment – and thus ultimately also between the past, the present and possible futures.
Works and documents from the period before, during, and after the Second World War shed light on the working methods of international artists and the global network they were involved in. They are complemented by diverse reflections on global protest movements and the traumas of war, thus also connecting to everyday experiences in a Europe beset by warfare.
Spector Books, 328pp, 21cm x 28cm, illustrated paperback, 2024
