Frantisek Starek was one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak underground movement and culture. Due to his long-lasting activity, he has built a very rich and interesting collection. In this collection, a lot of material – often unique – about Czechoslovak counterculture and personal resistance can be found. The collection covers the time period from the seventies to the nineties.

From the agents’ reports about the Orfeo-group, one gleans insights into one of the most unique alternative theatre companies in Hungary. These accounts were based on personal meetings and recollections of the performances. The secret police was interested in members’ political views, and they wanted to know how their ideas were presented in the plays and the talks and debates held after the performances. These documents are preserved at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL). The folder with the cover name “Community” shows how the political police created a picture about a group of “hostile” artists, who were perceived as dangerous to “the existing social order.”

The Council of Free Czechoslovakia is the largest fund in the archives of the Centre for Czechoslovak Exile Studies. It was donated to by Mojmír Povolný, the last president of this organisation, which, after the division of the CSFR, was renamed to the Council of Peace of the Czechs and Slovaks. The fund is a valuable source of information on political emigration activities between 1949 and 1983. In the fund you can find contacts with other compatriot organisations, exile journals, correspondence, or materials of the RSC. The first part of the collection was brought to Olomouc in 1997, the second part in 2006.

The aim of the C³ video archive is the complete compilation, preservation, cataloguing, archiving and digital transfer of Hungarian video art. Primarily, it was visual artists who began to experiment with this difficult-to-access (due to state control) medium in the second half of the 1970s. Their endeavours were not institutionally supported, with the exception of a few independent workshops. The archive aims to preserve these technologically unstable materials (earlier considered radical approaches to the moving image) in digital format, and, based on research, to make them available in their historical and international context.

It has also participated in the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media’s "40 years of video art in Germany" project. Recently, it supplied materials to "Oppositional voices: Art in the GDR from 1976-1989" in Martin-Gropius-Bau and to the exhibition "Notes form the underground" in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland.