With an (In)Human Face?! 1938–1989

In a layered visual collage, several authors search for the links between the events of 1938–89 Czechoslovakia, their historical visual representations and the artworks of the same period in the collections of the National Gallery. The authors were joined by our Zuzana Lednická, who, to quote the introduction, “was captivated by the multifariousness of the book and the amount of information. She participated in the final selection of materials and thus became an additional author. A collage selected by five subjects giving an idea about the period of oppression was born.” Reproduction of artifacts from the collections – which necessarily raises the question about the gallery’s acquisitions policy at the time – was provided with glossy paper, while the period written and pictorial documents, interviews, and art history texts were printed on an ordinary offset paper. In order to differentiate between the different types of texts, Jakub Spurný created original typewriter font named Werke for poems in the book. And as if it wasn't complicated enough, the book comes out in three language versions, which means that papers, colored backgrounds, and a yellow line grid on all pages, including the cover, stay, while the amount of texts (especially due to translations of facsimiles of documents) is substantially changing.