Archaeology of euphoria

#1 min Pavel Vančát

30. 9. 2019

At the end of 1989, totalitarian regimes in Eastern Bloc collapsed, which radically foreshadowed the development of the next decades and became an impulse of the end of history, the concept by Francis Fukuyama who theoretically outlined the post-historical phase of Western neoliberalism in 1992.

#34 archaeology of euphoriaEditorialArchaeology of euphoria

The prevailing bipolar view of the political change at that time often simplifies the situation. With sufficient distance today, we can look at the political and social changes not from the perspective of a turning point, but rather of “melting” or “transition”. It is a chance to describe not only the turning point itself, but also the overtures and finales of the related transformations, an attempt to describe many misunderstandings across the society, its dead ends and excesses. Such a perspective should not look only at one milestone, but at the entire transition phase from the 1980s to the establishment of neoliberal capitalism.

The 1980s and 1990s were also a time when postmodernism became more widely established as an artistic direction in Czechoslovakia. Postmodern theories not only responded to the sudden looseness of many fields, including arts, but also legitimized a number of disparate eclectic processes, thus actually delaying a real discussion on modernity as an aesthetic and social milieu. How are all these fundamentals and roots of our present democracy seen from today’s perspective? To what extent are we able to formulate our position at that time and compare it to where we really want to go today? What social and cultural identity did we accept, and under what conditions, and what have we kept from it?

 

Iren Stehli, z cyklu Pražské výlohy, 1992

#34 archaeology of euphoriaEditorialArchaeology of euphoria

Pavel Vančát

is a free-lance curator and writer, based in Prague. Since 2008, he has worked as project curator of StartPoint: prize for European Art Graduates. He has curated dozens of exhibitions of contemporary art, photography, and visual culture. He was the head curator of Prague’s Fotograf Festival 2019 and co-curator of m3 Sculpture Festival 2020: Layers of History.

#34 archaeology of euphoria

Filip Láb – Apostle of Future Photography

#5 min Filip Láb, Pavel Vančát

Filip Láb – Apostle of Future Photography

#41 Postdigital PhotographyProfilePostdigital photography

Filip Láb, who died unexpectedly and prematurely in May 2021, was not only a prominent theorist and teacher of photography, but was also one of a generation of artists that dealt with the shift in political polarities and radical changes in the photographic paradigm. His relatively short but very significant creative period, tied to his collaboration with Bára Mrázková, still surprises with its innovation and precision.

1985–1995: The Anti-decade, Discommunism, and Tunneling the Memory

#6 min Pavel Vančát

1985–1995: The Anti-decade, Discommunism, and Tunneling the Memory

#34 archaeology of euphoriaEssayArchaeology of euphoria

Although the term “contemporary history” is actually a contradiction, it refers mostly to the period of history that we lived in and that still directly affects us and our present. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent events leading to the collapse of the Eastern bloc are still a subject of speculation and re-interpretations that often lack a broader context. Such a context has a lot of parallel dimensions: a historical, geopolitical, social and media one, or a personal, family and local one (if we talk about the “history of the present”).