COURAGE

connecting collections

Jan Lopatka (1940–1993) was a Czech literary critic and historian, and signatory of Charter 77. To mark a symposium about his life and work, which was organised by the literary magazine Revolver Revue in June 2016 in Prague, a 17-minutes long time-lapse documentary called “Jan Lopatka: Zaostření pozornosti” (“Jan Lopatka: Focusing attention”), devoted to this important personality of Czech literary history, was created by Petr Kotyk and Bedřich Ludvík. In this film, edited by Bedřich Ludvík, recordings with Jan Lopatka made by Petr Kotyk in the 1990s as part of the Authentic project for the “Videotéka a fonotéka” (video and audio library) of the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature (LA PNP) were used. The film also covers Lopatka’s memories of the Czechoslovak samizdat magazine “Kritický sborník” (Critical Proceedings), which Lopatka edited during the second half of the 1980s, and his reflections on the meaning of the samizdat volumes.

Of the events of the recent past, it is worth mentioning the Notes from the Underground exhibition held in 2016 at the Muzeum Sztuki Łódź and then reopened at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2018, where tapes of the Artpool Radio could be heard.

Since the Bizottság-exhibition (“Sírba visztek” – A Bizottság a Műcsarnokba megy, Műcsarnok, September 3– 13 November 2011), Artpool has lent materials on several occasions for shows on the underground cultural context.
In recent years, international projects presented a selection of music posters from the Artpool collection. An important occasion was the Rock/Tér/Idő [Rock/Space/Time] exhibition at the Museum Ludwig Budapest in 2015.

Tamás Csapody’s book entitled Theory and Practice. Catholic Conscience Objectors in Hungary between 1979 and 1989, was finished in 1993 but was published only in 2016. This volume includes the documents and analyses of his research, which was done using questionnaires. Csapody collected data on people who refused to do compulsory military service. This study was done between 1988 and 1991, and he repeated it in 2005. The 100 questions on the questionnaire concerned the details and processes related to the objectors’ behaviour and ideas.