Two Tales of Two Cities: Contemporary Art, Southeast Asia, Divergent Approaches

gets at the crux of The Milk of Dreams. In the midst of a global pandemic and poised on the precipice of climate catastrophe, we sit at a crossroads. Alemani and artists like Leeson recognize that our possible futures are extensions of histories and past precedents. Consequently, we cannot simply invent a new future without retroactively laying the past groundwork—whether it is through revising an existing archive or inventing a new one. A notable absence in “The Witch’s Cradle” is Surrealism’s founder, André Breton. Instead, Alemani includes letters to Breton from Nadja (Léona Delcourt, 1902– 1941), Breton’s famous muse. Nadja wrote twenty-seven letters to Breton following their first encounter in 1927—letters filled with psychic automatic writing and drawings featuring obscure occult symbols. Breton mined their encounters and correspondences to write the first Surrealist novel, in which Nadja became shorthand for a mode of surreal vision, rather than a fully formed person. In “The Witch’s Cradle,” we see a small piece of paper with a lipstick-and-pencil print of her own lip, the words “c’est moi” scrawled underneath. The indexical trace of her mouth and the declaration “it’s me” insists on her corporeal presence, and with it her role in shaping what became among the most influential movements of the twentieth century. “It’s me” likewise reminds us that Nadja has always been there in the shadows, along with the creatures, cyborgs, monsters, hybrid bodies, plants, and animals that populate this exhibition, conjured from the past and projected into the future.