COURAGE

connecting collections

Elzbieta Lederer was born on 15 July 1922 in the Polish historical town of Lower Kazimierz. She studied philology. At the beginning of the 1960s in Poland, she met a distinguished personality of Czech journalism, Jiří Lederer. In 1967 they married and moved to Prague. She wrote in several prestigious Polish newspapers and translated materials. She also worked with the Polish Cultural and Information Center. Alongside her husband, she also took an active part in the social life and events that culminated in the Prague Spring. After the invasion of the allied troops into Czechoslovakia, like her husband, she was subjected to persecution. In the 1970s, Jiri Lederer strongly engaged in the Czechoslovak opposition. For this activity he was imprisoned several times, so his wife became part of the Czech dissent. Like her husband, Elzbieta Lederero signed Charter 77. In 1978, Ledererová was among the seventeen founding members of the VONS (Defense Committee of Unjustly Prosecuted). She was the only member who did not have Czechoslovak citizenship. After the release of her husband from prison, the family was assigned by the State Security to Asanace, a campaign set by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia to force out unwanted people, particularly those who had signed Charter 77. Under pressure and the threat that Elizbiter Lederer as a Polish citizen would not be able to extend her stay in Czechoslovakia, the family emigrated to West Germany. Jiří Lederer actively participated in the activities of exile but died in 1983. After 1989, Mrs. Lederero did not return to Poland but to Czechoslovakia. Elizbieta Ledererová received the Václav Benda Award in 2014, which is awarded by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. She died on 27 May 2017 and is buried with her husband in Bad Birnbach, Bavaria.

Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) was an iconic personality in the Latvian avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. While still at school, he created several hand-written samizdat magazines, together with his classmate Juris Boiko (1954-2002), influenced by Dadaism and the absurd. These publications attracted the attention of the KGB, and almost all the magazines were confiscated after it searched Lediņš' home. Nevertheless, he was able to enter the Riga Polytechnical Institute to study architecture in 1973. His friend Juris, whose parents were victims of political repression, was not so lucky. While student Lediņš started to organize experimental disco-lectures at the RPI Student Club. The first part would be a thematic lecture about architecture or contemporary music, but the second part consisted of listening to music and dancing. The discos were extremely popular, and tickets sold out in 15 minutes. Lediņš lectured on popular music, rock, and contemporary ‘serious’ music of the New Viennese School, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, John Cage, etc. The disco-lectures ended in 1977, when, after the Second Festival of Contemporary Music, the organization of which Lediņš also took part in, the director and the artistic director of the Student Club were dismissed. For some time, Lediņš continued the discos in Jūrmala and provincial towns. He also organized his home recording studio Seque, where he, Boiko, and the architect Imants Žodžiks recorded their own experimental music, inspired by art rock and the avant-garde. In 1981, together with the visual artist Leonards Laganovskis and some other friends, he started a new project, the Kosmoss discotheque, where mainly New Wave music was played, but it also became a place where Latvian alternative music was performed. The group ‘Dzeltenie pastnieki’ (The Yellow Postmen) played their first hits there, based on lyrics by Lediņš and Boiko. A new element was introduced: visual effects and multimedia experience. In 1983, Kosmoss was closed down by the authorities, due to its ‘ideologically and morally harmful character’. As an architect, Lediņš was interested mainly in the philosophy of architecture in its postmodernist expansion (the ideas of Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks), the living environment, and the perception of living and urban spaces. Architectural ideas were integrated into his art projects: actions, performances and videos made by the NSRD (Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings), which was first established in 1982 as an experimental music group, when Lediņš and Boiko were joined by the musician Inguna Černova. But later they gave this title to all the activities of their collective, which also included actions, performances, videos and multimedia art. Photographs from some actions were shown at exhibitions of work by young architects, and also at the exhibition ‘Vide, daba, cilvēks’ (Environment, Nature, Man) in 1984, the first exhibition where conceptual art was publicly shown. However, most of his activities were of an underground nature, and this was not only because the avant-garde art practized by the NSRD was not officially accepted, it was also a conceptual choice. For example, Walks to Bolderāja were considered by Lediņš as a private meditative practice. In the mid-1980s, Lediņš and Boiko created the independent artistic programme ‘Approximate Art’. With perestroika, the NSRD was able to popularize its art openly, the number of publications about the group increased significantly, and the NSRD participated in exhibitions. Lediņš and the NSRD received international recognition thanks to the exhibition ‘Riga-Latvian Avant-Garde’ in West Berlin, Kiel and Bremen in 1988 and 1989. The exhibition was a great success: it was the culmination of the NSRD’s activities, but also its end. From 1989, Juris Boiko and Hardijs Lediņš worked individually. Lediņš created the Approximate Art Agency with the aim of realizing a broad range of practical activities. However, its integration into international art proved to be more difficult than expected, and for several years Lediņš lived through a creative crisis. In the 1990s he started to experiment with electronic music. One of his last big projects was staging the opera ‘Rolstein on the Beach’ (an allusion to the opera ‘Einstein on the Beach’ by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson) with Kaspars Rolšteins in 1997.

Gabriella Lengyel (1948-) an activist of the Hungarian democratic opposition, sociologist, educator.

She was born in Budapest, his father was a radio mechanic had been running his own little shop, until it was ’nationalized’ by the Communist state. As a child she was a devoted member of the her school’s choir, and an extra for the National Theatre. In 1967 she started her studies at the Hungarian Actors Academy, but two years later she changed for studying history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest.

Through some friends she got in connection with the empirical research team of sociologist István Kemény and took part actively in the nationwide Roma survey from 1971, by visiting Gipsy families in the Trans-Danubian region. Inspirated by Kemény a year later she also started to study sociology at the university, as it was reintroduced legally in the curriculum of social sciences, and in the meantime she kept on being busy with her field researches. She received her MA degree in History in 1978 and in Sociology in 1981.

Gabriella remained a freelance sociologist up untill 1990, at the beginning to preserve her personal independence, and later because she failed to apply for state jobs, as a reknown activist of the opposition. During the 1980s she could not travel abroad either, as her claim for a passport was repeatedly refused by the police. In late 1979 she was one of the eight founding-members of SZETA, and the regular monthly meetings of activists for several years were held at her home in Miksa Déri street, in a workers’ district of Budapest. Apart from her sociological surveys and voluntary job done for SZETA she also took part in several activities of the dissident movement. She gave birth to her first child in 1984, and went on ’leave’ as an activist for a few years, but as the system was challenged by more and more radical changes, she herself reactivated. In 1987 she became a founding member, among others, of ’Asylum Committe’ a civilian organisation supported refugees fled from Ceausescu’s Romania, and was also an active organiser of the first independent Hungarian trade union, that of TDDSZ, ’Scientific Workers Democratic Union’ well before the political system changed.

Following 1990 she assisted her fiends became the member of Parieament Ottília Solt, and Gábor Havas to designe a new democratic social policy in Hungary. From 1993 she became one of the first educators of the newly established Social Worker Training School of John Wesley Theological College. After 1999 she returned to her field works as a freelance sociologist again, and conducted training courses of research methodology.

Eszter Leveleki was born in 1917. Her father was a factory director, and her mother worked as a teacher. She studied at the Szent Orsolya College, and in 1936 she started to work at the private kindergarten of Ms Márta Müller Nemes, who in the 1920s worked together with the Swiss psychiatrist Jean Piaget and gradually became one of the representatives of the reform pedagogy movement in Hungary. Leveleki also followed the pedagogical norms of Ferenc Mérei, who was an important figure in Hungarian social psychology. At the time, Waldorf and Montessori were the best-known alternative pedagogical methods.

Mirel Leventer (b. 25 December 1950, Bucharest) is a respected architect. He graduated from Ion-Luca Caragiale High School in 1969 and from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest (today the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism) in 1975. He has a rich professional experience, and has taken many professional development courses both in Romania and abroad. Between 1985 and 1993, he lived in Israel. At present he has dual Romanian and Israeli citizenship. His architectural work includes a number of major buildings, both in Romania and abroad, including a considerable number in Israel. He is a member of Club A in Bucharest and was the coordinator of its cine-club between 1970 and 1975, when he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture.

His interests include advertising, video production, mountaineering, travel, and film history. He continues to take pleasure in taking photographs. It is a passion of his that goes back almost half a century: “I’ve been taking photographs since high school, in fact since the eighth grade. So, in a way, I’ve almost always liked taking photographs. Indeed, when I was at high school I took part in many photographic exhibitions for pupils. There was also a photography club at high school. In those days, photography clubs were little amateur institutions, where we learned what to do with a camera. We had a coordinator, who in our case was our physics teacher, but the clubs had no special connection with school. A club like that encouraged us to develop a particular passion; I could say that this was where the ‘first seeds’ of a passion were sown” – the passion that would later give rise to the unique collection of photographs and films connected to Club A.