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Tomasz Konart was born in 1955 in Warsaw. In the seventies and eighties, he actively participated in the neo-avant-garde movement, creating works in the field of film, video, installation, and photography. Particularly associated with the artistic communities of Łódź and Warsaw, he was a co-founder of the Group T and co-founder of the Gallery Mospan and Gallery P.O. Box 17.
In the years 1975-1980 Konart studied at the Lodz Film School; he was one of the founders of the Group T operating at the Lodz Film School since 1980. Earlier, in the years 1977-1978, Konart co-hosted the Mospan Gallery in Warsaw, and then in 1979, the P.O. Box 17 Gallery - both with Tomasz Sikorski. It was at the Mospan Gallery that the first individual Konart presentation took place - The Walk in 1977. The next individual exhibitions of Konart's works were held, among others in the Foto-Medium-Art Gallery in Wrocław, Workshop Dziekanka in Warsaw, Mała Galeria in Warsaw, Labirynt 2 in Lublin and Piwna 20/26 in Warsaw - small, original galleries and studios created by neo-avant-garde milieus.
In the 1990s, Konart emigrated to Canada, where in 1999 he started studying at the New Media Department of Ryerson University in Toronto. In addition to experimental film, video, and photography, he also practices net art. His works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Lublin and the New Museum in New York. Konart lives and works in Toronto and Berlin, constantly maintaining contact with the artistic establishment in Poland.

Sources:
Tomasz Konart, http://tomaszkonart.net/#!bio.

Paul Kondas (1900-1985) was an Estonian naive artist. He was a teacher by profession. In 1919, he took part in the Estonian War of Independence against Soviet Russia (1918-1920). From 1925 to 1941 he was a teacher and director at the Suure-Jaani elementary school. In 1941, he was forced to leave Suure-Jaani, because he refused to cooperate with the German occupying authorities. In 1945, by the time of the Soviet annexation, he was appointed director of the Viljandi high school for adults. In 1951, he was dismissed for political reasons. After that, he worked as a teacher at the Heimtali school. He retired in 1961 and devoted himself to painting, fishing, and his correspondence. He was too old and eccentric for the state to be interested in him.

István Konkoly (1930) is a Hungarian Roman Catholic priest and former bishop of Szombathely. He studied at a high school in Szombathely, and then he studied theology at the Pázmány Péter Theological Academy in Budapest. He became a priest in 1954 in Szombathely. Konkoly was a chaplain in Gyöngyösfalu, Rábagyarmat, and Jánosháza between 1955 and 1962. He completed his doctor of theology in 1960. In 1962–1963, he served as vice-pastor in Szőce. Between 1963 and 1972, he was secretary to the bishop of Szombathely. He became an agent of the political police in 1959 under the codename “Mátrai,” but most of his reports were of no use to the Ministry of the Interior. He became so passive in the 1970s that he was expelled from the network in 1977. In 1963, he was made secretary of the National Liturgic Committee and in 1987 he became the president of the organization. Between 1972 and 1987, he was the pastor in Gencsapáti. In 1986, the state security established a connection with him again, because in the following year he became the bishop of Szombathely. He led the Diocese of Szombathely until 2006.

György Konrád grew up in a Jewish family in Berettyóújfalu, a village in eastern Hungary which at the time had a significant Jewish minority. His father was a hardware merchant. His mother was a descendant of a bourgeois family from neighbouring Oradea (in Hungarian, Nagyvárad), Romania. Before 1920 and between 1940 and 1944 the city had been part of Hungary. Berettyóújfalu Jews were deported and the majority of them were killed in 1944, but miraculously both of Konrád’s parents survived. He himself managed to survive in a Budapest house under Swiss protection. After the war, he became a student at the Reformed College in Debrecen. In 1947, he moved to Budapest to study in a renowned high school, the Imre Madách Gimnázium. In Budapest he was joined by his parents in 1950, when the state nationalized his father's business in Berettyújfalu.

Initially, Konrád enjoyed the democratic atmosphere of the high school, but after the Communist takeover this was lost, and indeed the school became quite the opposite of democratic. Students like Konrád, who did not toe the political line, were kicked out of the student association. Because of Konrád’s bourgeois background, he was not allowed to study Hungarian and French at Eötvös Loránd University. Rather, he was redirected to the Russian Institute. Many of the professors in the Instiute were old Russian emigrés, who had left their home country in 1917 and lived in one of the states that had become part of Yugoslavia. In 1948, after the Tito-Stalin split, however, they were unwelcome in Yugoslavia, but they were not allowed to return to the Soviet Union either, even though they were able to get Soviet citizenship. They ended up in other socialist countries like Hungary, where they often taught Russian. Inspired by them, Konrád developed a deep interest in Russian literature, and he wanted to write an entire monograph on Gogol. Konrád was particularly interested in how Gogol related to the state culture of the empire of Nicholas I and how he dealt with censorship. As Konrád explained in a 1988 interview, this choice was motivated by the analogies he discovered between the two systems. In April 1953, the Russian Institute was renamed after Lenin. It became a space for hard-liner Marxist-Leninists, who until then had taught at the Department of Philosophy. Konrád was dismissed, and he was also expelled from all institutions of higher education.

By autumn 1953, however, the political context changed. Imre Nagy had emerged as a principal political actor, and Konrád was admitted to university to pursue studies in Hungarian literature and linguistics. Konrád remembers these years as an interesting period, when political activism was on the rise among the youth, and he started to establish himself as a young writer and critic. This came to an end in 1956. During the revolution, he became a member of the National Guard, took hold of a machine gun he never used, and distributed flyers with his friends, one of whom was György Krassó. When Krassó was arrested in November 1956, the majority of their circle fled, including Konrád’s wife and sister. Konrád decided to stay.

As a result of his involvement in the revolution, Konrád could not find a permanent job until 1959, when he became a children's welfare supervisor in a lower class Budapest district, where poverty and alcoholism were widespread. Konrád’s experiences inspired a novel entitled A látogató (Magvető, 1969), translated into English as The Case Worker (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Konrád’s book was also influenced by Endre Fejes’ Rozsdatemető (Magvető, 1962; English translation: Generation of Rust, McGraw Hill, 1970), which depicted workers not as heroes of the workplace, but as troubled persons. Konrád started to work on The Case Worker in 1964 and finished in 1967. Both the Generation of Rust and Konrád’s novel were rejected by Szépirodalmi Publishing House, one of the two major publishing houses in Hungary at the time. In both cases, however, Szépirodalmi’s rival, Magvető, decided to publish the works (Standeisky, Kőszeg). The Case Worker met with negative reviews in the mainstream communist press, but it was appreciated by many literary critics, and most importantly by its readers. It became a hit at the 1969 Book Fair. Domestic success was followed by a rapidly increasing international reputation. By the mid-1970s, the novel had been translated into several Western languages.

From 1960 to 1965, while working as a social worker, Konrád  was also employed by the Magyar Helikon Publishing House as a part-time editor. He prepared the works of Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky for publication. In 1964, he was involved in publishing the short stories of Isaac Babel, a work that Konrád particularly enjoyed, in part because some of the short stories had not been published in the Soviet Union at that point.

In 1965, Konrád left both of his jobs to join the Urban Science and Planning Institute, where he worked closely with urban sociologist Iván Szelényi. The two published a number of essays and books together. In July 1973, however, Konrád was dismissed for his involvement in a political issue. The regime had refused to publish or allow the publication of Miklós Haraszti’s sociographical work Darabbér (‘Piece-Wage’), and Konrád assisted in a failed attempt to smuggle the manuscript to Yugoslavia. Haraszti was sentenced to prison, and Konrád was given a prosecutorial warning and lost his job.

After this, Konrád worked for a couple of months in a mental asylum in Doba, a small village in Transdanubia. This experience inspired his next novel, which he wrote between 1974 and 1978, A cinkos (The Loser). The Hungarian government did not allow it to be published, but it found its way to readers in samizdat. Meanwhile, by May 1974, Konrád and Szelényi finished their next sociological work entitled Az értelmiség útja az osztályhatalomhoz (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power), a study which had no chance whatsoever, given its content, of being published in socialist Hungary, but which nonetheless irritated the political police. The police subjected both authors to harassment, and Szelényi decided to leave the country, while Konrád choose internal emigration. Until 1988, when a second edition of The Case Worker was issued, only two works by Konrád were allowed to appear in Hungary: a censored version of his novel A városalapító (Magvető, 1977; in English: The City Builder by HBJ in 1977) and an essay in the journal Valóság in 1982 (Mondatok egy képzelt regényről, or ‘Sentences on an Imaginary Novel’).

During these years Konrád emerged as a leading voice of the democratic opposition. His works were published in samizdat, and Radio Free Europe gave him the chance to reach a wider audience. Konrád also became the most renowned Hungarian writer in the West. His books appeared in translations, and their publication and sale were major sources of income for him, as he could not get a legal job in Hungary. He also spent a considerable amount of time abroad. In 1977 and 1978, he spent time in West Berlin, the United States, and Paris, and in 1982/83 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He then spent a year at the New York Institute for the Humanities before returning to Hungary in 1984. In 1987/88, he taught world literature at Colorado College in the United States.

Neven Korda, the founder of the FV 112/15 Collection, was also the co-founder and leader of the FV 112/15 Group and FV Video. Between 1983 and 1989, he was a member of the band Borghesia, where he directed their performances and music videos and was responsible for the visualisation of their performances and concerts. Later, Neven studied sociology at the Faculty of Social Science in Ljubljana.

Today he is active in the field of performing arts and video ( art video, music video, documentary video, film). He is a director and video and multimedia artist with diverse artistic practices in the field of performance art and the art of projection. He has also written theatrical performances, films, documentaries, and video spots and he organises video workshops. His activities additionally cover the area of archiving and conservation of video recordings.

He has been occupied with questions of video as an artistic expression and as a medium. He started using video in the beginning of the 1980's when an accessible video equipment flooded the market. Between 1982 and 1988 he was a president of Music Section at ŠKD Forum and a leader of its clubs and concert programmes.

In the 1990's he worked as an editor, a postproduction leader and as a director for propaganda films, commercials and TV shows at numerous TV stations and video studios. In this era, he created short films, TV shows and documentaries in tandem with Zemira Alajbegović. At the turn of the century, he moved where he left off in the second half of the 1980's. He returned to his calling, author creation of theatre performances and audio-visual forms.

From the middle of the first decade of a new century, he broadened a field of his pure video with visualisations for club nights mainly concerts (VJ Barbato Kanak), with video objects, intermedia installations and performative lectures. He consistently uses his old video elements and his own art archive in new contexts to stress the meaning of memory and experiencing a video as a live event clash.

Source: DIVA digital video archive - e-arhiv.org, http://www.e-arhiv.org/diva/NevenKorda (accessed February 11, 2017).

Polish photographer, reporter and author of conceptual art series. Visual chronicler of economic, cultural and everyday life in the Polish People’s Republic in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Photographer of artistic life of the avant-garde of the 1960s, a member of artistic milieu gathered around the Foksal Gallery.

He came from Polish nobility, a family once bearing a count’s title. He was a son of Jan Kossakowski, a pediatric surgeon and an amateur photographer.
During Second World War he joined the resistance.

He graduated from Faculty of Architecture of Warsaw University of Technology where he was offered to work as a teaching assistant. However, he chose to pursue the career of a photographer.
Since 1957 he had cooperated with socio-cultural, illustrated magazines, such as „Polska”, „Ty i Ja”, „Zwierciadło”, „Stolica”.
These titles were published officially and aimed at presenting a positive image of a socialist country. Yet, they provided the readers with news on the most interesting scientific and cultural phenomena of those times – including the ones barely tolerated by the authorities.

In 1966 Kossakowski starts to cooperate with the avant-garde Foksal Gallery, based in Warsaw and devoted to conceptual art and the art of ephemeral events.
He started to collaborate with artists like Tadeusz Kantor or Edward Krasiński – today regarded as some of the most important for this period.
He also photographed the events taking place in other avant-garde milieus of the 1960s Poland: Cricot 2 Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, Krzywe Koło Gallery o Krzysztofory Gallery.

Due to the disintegration of the Foksal group and the political atmosphere in Poland, in 1970 he decided to emigrate to France.

He worked i.a. in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and the Pompidou Centre. He cooperated with French magazines and publishing houses. He also started to pursue conceptual photography. He gained recognition with his series 6 Metres Before Paris (6 metrów przed Paryżem, 1970-1971), presenting “Paris” road signs on the roads accessing the city, along with their suburban surroundings.
Other noteworthy series are the photographs of patches of light created by stained glass windows in the Chartres gothic cathedral – The Lights of Chartres (Światła Chartres, 1983-1990).

Sources:
Dobosz Andrzej, Eustachy Kossakowski (1925-2001), obituary, „Tygodnik Powszechny” 2001 no 49, p. 15.
Wierzbicka Anna, Eustachy Kossakowski. Fotograf, „Biuletyn Historii Sztuki” 2004, no 3/4, pp. 412-413.
Polit Paweł (ed.), Edward Krasiński. Elementarz ABC, Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków 2008.
Sienkiewicz Karol, Eustachy Kossakowski, profile on the portal Culture.pl 2009, http://culture.pl/pl/tworca/eustachy-kossakowski

Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska was born in Vinnytsia, Ukraine in 1931. She was the niece of Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Her father Khoma married Kateryna Bedryzova, a Crimean of Armenian descent, who was trained and educated classically in St. Petersburg. In 1929, Bedryzova was accused of Ukrainian nationalism and only her Armenian heritage kept her from being included in a criminal case against the members of an organization called the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.” That said, Bedryzova embraced the family’s efforts to preserve and protect Kotsiubynsky’s literary legacy. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Kotsiubynska recalled how her parents struggled to save their family as well the Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky museum. Her father Khoma refused to evacuate the family until they were issued an entire train car to take with them the museum’s holdings from Chernihiv. Miraculously, their request was met in the final hour, but as they waited for their train car to be attached to trains heading into the Soviet interior, Nazi bombs began falling all around them. Mykhailyna recalled in her memoirs how in that moment her parents protected that which was most valuable to them. They placed Mykhailyna on top of the trunk holding Kotsiubynsky’s original manuscripts and used their bodies to shield both from the fallout.

Despite Kotsiubynska’s ties to Ukrainian literary royalty, she was unable to avoid the post-Khrushchev crackdown on the cultural intelligentsia entirely, although unlike some of her counterparts, she was not sentenced to hard labor and exiled. Kotsiubynska lost her job at the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in 1966, the same year she was asked to turn in her party card following her participation in a protest staged at a Kyiv screening of Sergei Paradhznov’s film “Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors.” This film was an internationally acclaimed adaptation of the eponymous novel written by her uncle Mykhailo, but became a lightening rod for political protest, after a wave of arrests of Soviet writers and artists indicated renewed ideological retrenchment. While working at the Institute of Literature, Kotsiubynska had befriended and became a mentor to a young Vasyl Stus and is responsible for making much of his oeuvre accessible posthumously to the broader public. Her insights into his creative process were invaluable, and after decades of silence Kotsiubynska also wrote prodigiously after independence, chronicling the struggle of this circle of Kyivan intellectual and writers in the face of an oppressive and unyielding Soviet system.

Petr Kotyk is a Czech literary historian and curator in the Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature. Since 1990 he had been making video recordings depicting Czech poets and writers as part of the time-lapse project, “Authentic”. The project focused on public events (readings, discussions, literary conferences, etc.) as well as private (recording the memories of authors and contemporaries). Kotyk is responsible for many publications and exhibitions in related to contemporary Czech literature. In January 2017 he was awarded the Czech PEN Club Prize for his work and achievements.

Poet, philosopher, architect, urbanist. After graduating with a degree in architecture, he became a disciple of philosopher Béla Hamvas. A few years later, they participated in a series of conversations with Béla Tábor and Lajos Szabó, which made a strong impact on him, and he choose Szabó as his new master. He got a serious infection in 1948, and his arm was paralyzed.

Following the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956, he emigrated with his family (and also with Szabó and his wife) to Brussels, where he studied architecture and urbanism. According to his wife, he preferred conversations to letters, and more than once, triggered by a book, he would locate the author, travel to his home, and ring the bell. This seems to have been the case with Guy Debord in 1960.

Kotányi became involved with the Situationist International (SI) in 1960, the same year he became director of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism in Brussels. He participated in the group’s conferences held in September 1960 in London, August 1961 in Göteborg, and November 1962 in Antwerp. He was appointed to the Central Council of the SI; he participated in the first four sessions held in November 1960 in Brussels, January 1961 in Paris, April 1961 in Munich, and February 1962 in Paris. Kotányi served as the main editor of issues 5, 6, and 8 of Internationale Situationniste, as well as the inaugural issue of Situationistik Revolution, published in October 1962.

He contributed a number of seminal essays to the journal, including Gangland and Philosophy, 1961, Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism, 1961, co-authored with Raoul Vaneigem, and Theses on the Commune, on which he collaborated in 1962 with Debord and Vangeiem. In the summer of 1963, he submitted a proposal (as a private letter) with the outline of a radical reorientation for the movement. The text and he himself were accused of mysticism by Debord, and as a consequence, he was expelled from the group.

Pavel Kouba is a Czech philosopher and pupil of Jan Patočka. Kouba studied German and Russian at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. He attended underground philosophical seminars conducted by Jan Patočka from 1973 to 1977. Together with Ivan Chvatík, another of Patočkaʼs students, he cooperated on the samizdat publishing of Patočkaʼs works, and he co-organised underground seminars, even after Patočkaʼs death in 1977. From 1980 to 1989 he worked as a librarian at the Institute of Architecture, Prague City Council. In 1990 he became a research fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (later Czech Academy of Sciences), and together with Ivan Chvatík, he founded the Jan Patočka Archives. Having been awarded the research fellowship by the Humboldt Foundation he spent two years (1992–1994) at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster in Germany. Then, he briefly served as a head of the Twentieth Century Philosophy Department at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and in 1995 he joined the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, where he became an associate professor in 1996. Between 2000 and 2004 he served as director of the Centre of Phenomenological Research, jointly run by the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Charles University. In 2003, Kouba was appointed a professor.

 Pavel Kouba deals mainly with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and with Patočkaʼs attempt at their synthesized interpretation. In his studies he focuses on current issues of phenomenological philosophy and hermeneutics (pertaining to H. Arendt, E. Fink, H.-G. Gadamer), since the late 1980s with special emphasis on the interpretation of Nietzsche. His main interest is currently the hermeneutic concept of fundamental ontological problems, in particular the relation between space and time.

Viktor Koval (born in March 1941, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khabarovsk Region, RSFSR) was an engineer who came to the Moldavian SSR (the city of Bălți) in 1974, after previously working in various cities of the Russian Far East and the southern region of European Russia (such as Novorossiisk). Koval was of Russian ethnic background and came to the MSSR along with many other engineers and technicians of Russian extraction who staffed the expanding industrial enterprises of Soviet Moldavia during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of his arrest in March 1982, Koval had been working for the past five years as a head engineer at an electrical equipment plant, in the section dealing with construction works. According to the material of the official investigation, Koval began to openly express ”anti-Soviet” opinions in late 1977, mainly at his workplace. He was very critical of the Soviet political structure, in general, and the electoral system, in particular, claiming that Soviet citizens lacked any real civil liberties and political rights, while deputies were pre-selected by the party instead of being elected by the people. The KGB correctly identified the Western radio stations which Koval used to listen to (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, BBC, etc.) as the major sources of his criticism and discontent. This coincided with the regime’s own fears of foreign propaganda, but also proved the real impact of the “enemy stations,” despite Soviet jamming efforts.

The most serious incident linked to Koval’s rejection of “Soviet democracy” occurred on 4 March 1979, when he adamantly refused to take part in the token elections for the Supreme Soviet and argued his position in front of the members of the electoral commission. The case files point to a growing radicalisation of Koval’s views during the next two years. Thus, in early 1980 he criticised the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claiming that it was in fact a case of brutal interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state rather than an example of “internationalist assistance,” as the official propaganda insisted. Even more serious from the authorities’ perspective was Koval’s open support for Polish Solidarity. In August 1980, he praised the Gdansk workers’ revolt as a model of true democracy and “people’s power,” contrasting it with the sham democratic credentials of the Soviet regime and the purely formal existence of Soviet trade unions. In late 1981, he condemned the brutal police repression of the Solidarity movement and the declaration of the state of siege, viewing these events as a suppression of the people’s will. These opinions led the KGB officials to conclude that they were dealing with a particularly dangerous case of anti-regime attitudes. This was also confirmed by the search of Koval’s apartment, which led to the discovery of a number of papers and notes with an “anti-Soviet” content. He did not spread or propagate his views in written form (aside from the small incident with the leaflets found near his factory in early 1982), but was quite frank in his conversations with his co-workers.

Following the trend of using punitive psychiatry in order to suppress open opposition, Koval was subject to a psychiatric evaluation, which found that he suffered from “latent schizophrenia,” despite the fact that the evidence was not convincing. Rather than receiving a prison sentence, on 27 August 1982 he was sent to a special psychiatric facility of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs located in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine). During the Perestroika period, on the occasion of the Nineteenth Party Conference held in Moscow in June 1988, Koval filed a petition for his release and rehabilitation, claiming that he was punished for his political opinions. However, this petition was rejected by the General Prosecutor of the MSSR in October 1988 on the grounds that Koval’s action was still “socially dangerous.” He was released in May 1990, when Article 203, part 1, of the Penal Code of the MSSR, on which Koval’s conviction was based, was abolished. He was definitively rehabilitated only in November 1991, following a special decision of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Moldova, which recognised that Koval’s case was political in nature (without explicitly condemning the use of punitive psychiatry). Koval’s fate after his release remains unknown.

András Kovács (1947-) is a sociologist and one of the most significant researchers on the Hungarian Jewish community and Antisemitism in Hungary. He was a member of the democratic opposition and an active participant in the anti-communist movements and the dissemination of samizdat publications. He joined the project launched by Ferenc Erős and András Stark on second-generation Holocaust survivors and played a decisive role in the creation of this interview collection.

Kovács studied philosophy and history and completed his PhD in sociology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. With his colleagues, he intended to renew the organizations of the Communist Youth League in the Faculty of Humanities in the early 1970s. Kovács was one of the intellectuals who was initially Marxist, but who became disillusioned in 1968, when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded Prague to halt reforms. These young undergraduates no longer believed that the communist system could be reformed, and they gave voice to this opinion. The authorities launched proceedings against Kovács, charging him anti-state incendiarism because of his participation in the reform movement at the university.

After completing his degree, he worked in the editorial office of the Kossuth Publishing House. He continued his activity as a member of the intellectual opposition movement, and he attended numerous seminars held in private apartments. In 1977, the first significant samizdat-book, entitled Marx a negyedik évtizedben (“Marx in the fourth decade”) was published at his initiative. In this manuscript collection, 21 intellectuals gave voice to their (mainly negative) opinion of the relevance of Marx and Marxist philosophy. As a consequence, he was fired. Beginning in the late 1970s, he earned a livelihood by doing ad hoc translation and editing work. He was one of the figures of the important anti-regime movements, so among the authors of the so-called “Bibó Memory Book” and signatories to the Charta 77 statement, which was a protest against the suppression of and reprisals taken against the opposition in Prague.  

Because of his Jewish family origins, he was interested in the issue of the Jewish community after World War II, the suppression of the memory of the Holocaust, and the ways in which the traumas of the Holocaust was passed on from one generation to the next within families. He was also motivated in his career as a scholar by fellowships and a research trip abroad. Kovács had opportunities to pursue research and teaching in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. In the mid-1980s, he began to study Jewish communities and Antisemitism. He joined the project launched by Ferenc Erős and András Stark, and he became a key figure of the interview project on second-generation Holocaust survivors. Kovács has been active in this work since 1984. The interviews which were done on this officially taboo topic had an effect on the interviewers and the interviewees, but also on the larger aim to bring taboos to the foreground and foster discussion among professional audiences and the wider public on issues which were suppressed by the regime.

Grzegorz Kowalski – creator of installations, performer, exhibition curator and famous educator. Professor at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Students of his studio include the most well-known and intriguing figures of Polish contemporary art, mostly members of the “critical art” movement of the 1990s.

Born to an intelligentsia family, he was raised by a single, widowed mother – an economist working in public administration. His father, an engineer, died in the Second World War, during forced labour in Germany. He spent his childhood in the ruins of Warsaw.

In 1959-1965, he studied at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. During his studies, he attended the sculpture studio of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and the Solids and Planes Studio, led by Oskar Hansen, an architect, urban planner and a theoretician of visual arts. Working with them had a strong impact on his own artistic practice and didactics.

He graduated with honours and started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts soon afterwards. In 1984, he took over the studio from Jarnuszkiewicz and continues to run it to this day, currently under the name of the “Studio of Audiovisual Space”.

Kowalski made his debut at the avantgarde Foksal Gallery – then a prestigious, leading Polish institution with contacts in Western Europe, concentrating pioneers of action art, happening and installations. There, he exhibited his “dynamic environments” and “audiovisual séances” – installations open to the participants' creative actions.

In 1968, he left for a sculpting symposium accompanying the Olympic Games in Mexico City, where he builds the monumental, geometric “Sundial”. Soon afterwards, he is awarded a scholarship and an internship at the University of Illinois in the United States. Kowalski stresses that the year 1968 is a turning point in his biography and self-understanding. He experiences the March '68 antisemitic campaign in Warsaw, the Tlatelolco massacre occurs during his stay in Mexico City and soon after that he follows the invasion in Czechoslovakia from across the ocean.

As he said in a biographical interview: 'While until '68 one would attempt to establish some sort of cooperation within the framework of this regime, simply in order to live and to do something positive... Some form of cooperation was accepted... After '68, there were no illusions anymore – this was a system that could not be reformed in any way, it had to be rejected'. 'I became a dissident' – he adds in reference to this moment.

During his travels through the United States, he also witnessed the explosion of the hippie movement in New York. This experience had a strong and lasting impact on him. He decided to abandon his ambitions of a career as a “symposium artist” and a sculptor of monumental forms, choosing to be active in a small community of people interested in art instead.

Kowalski got involved in a group of artists established by former students of Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz, centered around a small gallery at the University of Warsaw and Warsaw's high street. Although the space was provided by the party-controlled Polish Students' Association, it had a decidedly “off” air and in time, actions in the gallery were increasingly political and critical toward the authorities. This culminated in participation in a student strike and an occupation of the university just before the imposition of martial law, which led to the closing of both the university and the gallery

However, for those involved in Repassage Gallery, the community itself and the deepening of relations in a small group of friends, a safe haven, were more important than reaching out to a wider audience and creating artifacts. They spoke of “the art of being together” and the primacy of experience before creation. Performative and processual actions co-created by participants dominated. The gallery did not declare a program and refrained from assuming aesthetic and ideological criteria in advance. This resulted in an opening to amateur and naive art, as well as in the rejection of the distinction between artists and non-artists. At the height of its activity, Repassage was led by Elżbieta and Emil Cieślar. Grzegorz Kowalski, who was involved with the gallery for all of its history, can be seen as an “éminence grise” of sorts.

In this environment, Kowalski starts to pose his “basic questions” which were to be answered by means of plastic arts or performances: “Could You and Would You Like to Become an Animal in Front of the Camera?” (1977-78), “Could You and Would You Like to Treat Me Like an Object?” (1979), and “Would You Like to Return to Your Mother's Womb?” (1981-87). Actions with people materialize as “photographic objects”, “tableaus” or “collections”.

In the words of art historian Łukasz Ronduda, Kowalski “attempted to saturate Hansen's quasi-scientific (objective and rationalist) discourse, as well as the paradigm of games and cooperations followed by the master and his students in a similar vein, with a human element: strongly existential, sensual, subjective, irrational, psychologizing, even spiritual”.

The didactic method at Kowalski's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts continues Jarnuszkiewicz's and Hansen's partnership-based approach, drawing from theoretical innovations and a set of exercises developed by the latter, from collective actions carried out by their students – such as Wiktor Gutt, Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek and the Cieślars – as well as from the countercultural spirit of the community around Repassage.
Kowalski emphasizes that he prefers “education” – developing autonomous artistic personalities – rather than “teaching” – imparting the rules of the craft and historical forms. At the same time, as Karol Sienkiewicz points out, Kowalski's didactic approach is characterized by a tension between the individual and the collective, it is a “search for balance between one's own problems, identity, personality, individual expression and  interpersonal relations, events in collective memory and functioning in society”.

Sociologist Gyula Kozák (1941–) was the founder and, until 1999, the head of the Oral History Archives. In 1981, together with András Hegedűs B. (1930–2001), he began to do oral history interviews with participants in and witnesses to the 1956 Revolution, which was considered the number one taboo in public discourse in Hungary at the time.

Kozák was born to a well-off bourgeois family in Budapest, though World War II and his parents’ early divorce shook the family. He witnessed 1956 as an adolescent, and the revolution had a deep impact on his mentality and his emotions. As a fifteen-year-old boy, he wandered around the city watching the events of the revolution: the demonstrations and street fights. In late November 1956, he left home and, together with the great flood of Hungarian refugees, managed to get to Vienna, but a month later, he returned to Budapest. In 1958, together with some friends, he found some hidden guns, and he resolved to start the fight against the regime again, but he and his friends were caught before could take action. He was arrested by the police and was held in custody for a month, but was then released. He had some trouble in school when he returned, and he was almost prohibited from being allowed to pass his matriculation exam.

He then went on to study at the Technical University Budapest, but he was far more interested in the social sciences than he was in engineering, sociology. However, higher education in sociology had been prohibited in 1949 by the communist system, and it was only reestablished in the early 1970s. Thus, instead of being able to acquire proper theoretical training, he was only able to participate in some sociological fieldwork. He took part as an assistant in surveys conducted by the National Cultural Institute and then by the Higher Educational Research Institute. In 1969, he managed to get a job for two years at the Social Science Research Institute, the strategic “think tank” of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Here he joined the preparatory works for new nationwide surveys which examined the circumstances in which industrial workers, Roma, and the poor lived. The surveys were done under the guidance of István Kemény, a pioneering researcher of Hungarian empirical sociology. Kemény exerted a strong influence on Kozák’s way of thinking and, indeed, the approaches and mentalities of many young scholars, as he forced them to confront social realities and the simple fact that there were major social problems in communist Hungary, including a lack of equal opportunity and sufferings under the socialist system of the time. This critical attitude was strengthened when, in the mid-1970s, Kozák began to contribute, as expert and script writer, to a good dozen documentary film projects being done by the Béla Balázs Studio (BBS) and Hungarian Televison (MTV).

At the same time, he took an active part in some underground art movements and alternative cultural initiations, working for a while e.g. as a light master for the University Theater of Budapest. He had also several good contacts among dissident writers and intellectuals.    

The activities in which he engaged brought him increasingly into conflict with the communist regime. In 1972, Kozák took part in the preparations for a conference on workers’ social problems. The conference itself was banned, and the book of relevant studies was confiscated by the police. In 1979, he also signed a declaration of solidarity with the members of the Czechoslovak Charta 77 movement who had been imprisoned, and he lost his job as a consequence of this. He was repeatedly harassed, threatened, and blackmailed by the secret police, which tried to force him to become an informant, but he resisted the pressure they put on him.

In 1981, Gyula Kozák began to work together closely with András Hegedűs B. They were both commissioned by the Economic Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science to do oral history interviews with Hungarian business managers. At the same time, they began to do research on their own concerning 1956. They collected data and produced a historical chronology of the events, and they also organized “Round-table talks on 1956.” and a series of group and individual interviews with one-time participants in the Hungarian revolution. This collective work led in 1985 to the creation of the Oral History Archive and in 1989 to the creation of the 1956 Research Institute. Kozák was a leading founder of both. He is also the author of a number of books and editor of several other books and studies published by the Institute.   

Jerzy Kośnik is a Polish photographer known for his photojournalist work on film festivals all over the world. He photographed the most famous actors and film-makers.

Since 1977 he had been accredited with the Polish journal "Film", but he was fired in 1981 after his photos from Cannes Film Festival, which clearly showed his sympathies for the Solidarity movement. His pictures of famous movie stars wearing Solidarity badge (especially the one with Jack Nicholson) very quickly reached common recognition. During martial law he cooperated with French press agency Gamma Press Image, for which he provided first-hand images of Poland under turbulence and terror. His photos were used for the Solidarity political campaign during first semi-free elections in Poland in 1989.

Photographs by Jerzy Kośnik may be seen in European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk, where they tell the story of world support for democratic changes in Poland.