By Emma Foley

To celebrate Maintenant 19’s upcoming release, I talked to some of the journal’s contributors. This year, we sent out an open call for artists to submit work on the theme of ethics cleansing. I wanted to know why these contributors are called to Dada in 2025, how they define ‘ethics cleansing’, and incorporate it into the geography of their work. 

From the Introduction of Maintenant 19: “MAINTENANT 19 is a testament to the unflinching exposure of self-righteousness. We are no longer bred to be rational creatures.”

I spoke with Heide Hatry, Sandra Gea, Volodymyr Bilyk, Marta Janik, Kathleen Florence, Anna O’Meara, and Fork Burke. Read the conversation below.

Emma Foley: Why is Dada important to the post-postmodern world, and in 2025?

Heide Hatry’s EGG

Heide Hatry: “If art cannot find and affect the human beneath the accretion of habit, oblivion, and spiritual lassitude, then it has lost its purpose and we are without hope. This accretion is when the need for Dada is most desperate. In our own era, we speak of the red pill or perhaps a transformative virus; suggestions suited to an understanding of art amidst an existential situation that seems to cry out for a god, or horribile dictu, technology, to save us… I can reply only that if you know what freedom is, then you know that integrity and compassion are essential to it.”

Kathleen Florence: “Dada is important because it’s not. Its refusal to matter protects it from being absorbed by the systems it refuses to serve. Its lack of importance is what allows it to live on. Dada doesn’t attempt to fix the world. It reflects the strange rather than the stylized version that maintains established forms of power. Often, people don’t know what to make of Dada-inspired art. In part, that’s the point. Easy answers are slogans made to be consumed. Dada embraces the unresolved. It signals to those who want something more complex than ‘cleaning solutions’.”

Kathleen Florence’s, A Proven Formula

Anna O’Meara: “Everyone in the world today is in some way an inheritor of the world Dada portrayed and protested. As the world collapses, what do we do? Dada provides an outlet for protest and expression but also, very importantly, humor. Humor is Dada’s secret weapon. Instead of submitting under the boot of oppression and devastation, humor and irony create new alternatives, like a creative game. Humor gives individuals a sense of power that reverberates with audiences. Humor strikes with critiques of absurd contradictions.” 

Fork Burke: “Dada disrupts all validity of the construct–it has the capacity to bring clarity in infinite ways–revealing the collage of control’s power strategies at the core of control’s intention–it is language and expression–it’s a creation passage–the imagined realms are not stuck in resistance–the position of unstoppable is assumed–Dada has legacy beyond its first sparks.”

EF: What is Ethics Cleansing?

Volodymyr Bilyk’s Boom Galore

Volodymyr Bilyk: “Ethics is in many ways a hypocritical make-believe imposed by institutions that regulate culture. In Ukraine, ethical double standards get drunk and sleep in their own vomit. This manifests itself most vividly with a highly problematic concept of “doing it for the culture”–where you can’t make something because you find it curious or it reflects your ways of seeing the world, nah, you need to do something that would be a meaningful contribution to the Ukrainian Culture at large–something that would contribute to its “greatness”. Because otherwise the culture will cease to exist and it is going to be your fault.”

EF: How did making ‘Ethics Cleansing’ the backdrop to your creative process affect your work? 

Marta Janik’s Belongings, Not Belongings

Marta Janik: “This year’s theme touches very important issues like ethics, power, wealth, corruption, favoritism. It all made me wonder about how we understand words, what they mean to us, do we reach any conclusions discussing them? While making the collage I thought about all these issues. It features a person who may have dreamt of a crown, of being a king, but the crown unfortunately turned out to be so big that it obscures the whole view, you can’t see anything from under it. This is a pity, because there is a mirror right next to it, which could force one to self-reflect. There are bars of gold, a symbol of wealth. They lie on the ground, what could be done with them? There is a scale, a symbol of justice, balance and impartiality. My favorite element is the book, from which light gushes forth. I want to believe that there is true freedom in the ability to read with understanding. This is what I cling to. Language, speech, conversation, imagination, stories – is there anything more precious?”

Sandra Gea’s The Shadows in my Closet

Sandra Gea: “My work, mainly autobiographical, is an act of self-empowerment, a reclaiming of my feminine body from the overculture. As long as societal conditioning insults and abuses my body, or any human body, I am–we are–not free. The collage “The Shadows in my Closet” exposes the pain and confusion of an instinctive nature yielding to the narratives of shame in order to survive. Trapped, fueled by the rage of self-betrayal and self-abandonment, younger versions of myself linger in the shadowlands of my subconscious. The creative process becomes the crucible for ethics cleansing: rage alchemized into a piece of redemption, self-forgiveness and freedom.”

Maintenant 19: A Journal of Contemporary Dada will be released on July 15th. Preorder it here.

Emma Foley is a writer and editor at Three Rooms Press.