[Music] this amazing photo montage is by german artist hannah and it's from 1919 and has an extremely long title cut with the kitchen knife dada through the last weimar beer belly cultural epic of germany 1919 that was a really pretty fraud moment so what was going on political chaos the government has been completely changed after world war one there's a lot of conflict between the spartacists the far left-wing communists and the frey court was encouraged to attack people by members of the government so there are all these clashes and a lot of people end up getting arrested and some people end up getting killed and that's just one particular moment january of 1919 all of that infighting happened so all this fragmentation is just beautifully captured here the contrast from the kind of long war which would have really focused the country's attention and then this complete breakdown can you think about the title cut with a kitchen knife think about the idea of cutting things literally right that works for the photo montage and she's cutting a swath through all this and piecing things back together in ways that make sense to her focusing on the fragmentation as defining culture at that moment i'm assuming most of these photographs came from newspapers for magazines they did and so it's all immediate and topical and all relevant at this moment but it's being reconstructed but i love that it's a kitchen knife she's very focused on the role of women artist as a goddess how was she treated and she wasn't treated very well i think one of the things she actually had a problem with is a lot of male dotis had grand ideas about changing cultural moraes and views and gender equity but then in their practice of that they did nothing there's a couple of ways that that is visualized here if we look at the very central image and we actually see one of the foremost german expressionist artist katya culvets and the body underneath her is dancer niddy impact and if you look at the way that that forms a central point around which everything else rotates and there is a sense of movement happening all at the same time one thing i always think is really interesting is tiny little head is actually hana instead of putting her signature she puts a little portrait of herself and what it is is it's actually pasted onto the corner of a map which shows the countries in europe that had women's voting rights at the time so that's one of the ways that we know she was thinking about the role of women in society and in the art world so first of all if you think about this image in terms of quadrants usually the right side is known as the anti-daughters now the people that are in the antedat corner are obviously politicians kaiser wilhelm is right here his head is really big and this figure is quite large she makes fun of crazy wilhelm with this little figure of two wrestlers that are creating the mustache so then there are also other political figures there's general von hindenburg the head of him on the body of this exotic dancer down here there is german minister of defense gustav noska i mean he's talking to another general and this general appears standing on their heads but if we go down here in the lower right corner we see the world of the daughters right here it says dara easton so this is the corner that has hanahach and the map and then it also has other dadas figures there's the goddess rebel houseman hannah had a relationship with houseman for a while and for a long time all the literature on her referred to as the wife of rel hausmann here you see the two heads of goddess george gross and villain herzfeld the brother of john hartfield and niddy impacovin the same dancer that's in the center here is now over here bathing john hartfield in this bath in here we have lennon and then there's another goddess johannes bader and then you see one of the communist party leaders carl roddick and he was back and forth between russia and germany so he's very involved with the communist party karl marx then over here is the head of modern art critic and writer theodore dabbler and his head is on top of a baby's body so really infantilizing all these yeah and then they're all men on the left side they're forms of data this is dada propaganda this is einstein right here actually and he is saying a couple of different things right here this little bit of text is in german and it says young man data is not an art trend that it's not just something that's coming and going and then it's actually something more meaningful now down here there's a lot of scenes of mass gathering so we see carl lee next um one of the german communist party leaders along with rosa luxembourg who were jail tortured and then assassinated in january 19. he's saying join dada donna is going on all over europe and there are different centers of data and they all have different art making practices and photo montage is central to the berlin goddess well the whole notion of the kitchen knife right is really empowering the idea of domesticity as being something that could undermine cultural values it's amazing [Music]