Recently Scholars of design history began to recognize the phenomenon of Socialist Modernism, the return to modernist aesthetics to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the thaw, the disavowal of Stalinist policies by Nikita Khrushchev after the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party in February of 1956 and the resulting turn away from Socialist Realism, a historicist method in architecture that expressed socialist values, which the Stalinist favored. Scholars of art and design argued that Socialist Modernism in Poland constituted an affirmation of the party’s authority and that of the political system because designers who practiced it focused on abstract form and technological experiments. Unlike the modernism of the early 20th century, which followed a utopian ideology to ensure universal well being through art and design, it focused on the aesthetics of elementary form. However, based on this research, I investigated the journal Projekt of the main state-sponsored publisher in the years, 1956-1970. I have found that its contributors practiced a pragmatic modernism. Although they focused on technological experiments and utilized abstract form, failing to engage in politics, the designers that surrounded Projekt attempted to create user center design that fostered the well being of man, avant-garde values that the 1920s and 1930s functional modernist groups of Central and Eastern advocated. Therefore, following a period of Socialist Realism (1948-1956) in Poland, Projekt advocated for avant-garde values in design while ignoring the political situation, therefore fulfilling a pragmatic site in which it tolerated the authoritarian party, but argued for user based, socially conscious design that connected it to like minded designers in the west.

Panelstories: Ethnography of Space (Re)production at Černý Most Modernist Housing Estate. Mgr. Michal Lehečka Abstract: The dissertation focuses on spatial environment of socialist modernist housing estates. Based on data collected during a 10year long fieldwork in multiple modernist housing locations, it explores dominant ways of spatial (re)production of Černý Most housing estate in Prague. Thanks to its ownership and ethnic structure Černý Most represents an ideal fieldwork site where both long term and contemporary phenomena resulting from the post-socialist transformation can be detected, described and analysed. After 1989, former socialist modernist cities have undergone a plethora of political, economical and social changes and disruptions. These changes continuously uncover an ongoing interaction between the initial egalitarian and collectivist heritage of the housing estate as well as its ambiguous and fragmented property structure. Spaces of the estates are continuously (re)produced through various manifestations of actors' territorial claims. The spatial changeability is best described by Henri Lefebvre's notion of socio-material (re)production of space and his widely used concept of spatial triad (Lefebvre 1991). Transformation of housing estates is therefore (re)produced through (in)visible...

The dissertation thesis is focused on specific segment of contemporary visual artists from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Slovak Republic, whose work reflects the recent past. The thesis maps and interprets artistic reflections of the past with emphasis on the era of socialism in the region of Central Europe, and defines the characteristic features of the generation of artists born in the 70s and their position in the post-socialist situation. These artistic approaches are categorized and anchored in the broad current of the so-called historiographical turn in contemporary art and put in a broader cultural and art historical context. Keywords contemporary art, Central Europe, historiographic turn, archive, socialist modernism, nostalgia