On Thursday 5 December at 6 pm, in the MOCAK Library there will take place a lecture by Hanna Marciniak entitled Avant-garde versus Avant-garde. Anti-avant-garde trends in Czech culture of the 1930s and 40s.

The session will be focus on the anti-avant-garde trends that first appeard in Czech
literature, art and criticism in the 1930s, frequently arising from movements traditionally associated with broadly understood artistic avant-garde such as surrealism, expressionism and the poetics of Grupa 42.

Such decentralist and autocritical tendencies such as an idiosyncratic, antropologically argued realism, historical catastrophism, or questioning innovation and originality as the universal evolutionary law of art all cause the apparently monolythical movement known as the avant-garde to split from within while putting a question mark over the soundness of the very concept of avant-garde in the context of Czech culture.

Hanna Marciniak – post-graduate student at the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies, Charles University, Prague. Translator: Czech, English. She has been working on a thesis devoted to the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz and Jiří Kolář in the context of personal writing and giving testimony to the Shoah. She is also researching in the avant-garde theory of image.

The lecture and discussion will be conducted in Polish.