How does pop culture influence contemporary politics? Why is gender important in shaping the ideal Czechoslovak cyborg, and what role did astrology play in the breakup of Czechoslovakia? These and other questions are answered by digital anthropologist Marie Heřmanová, sociologist Dominik Želinský, and historian Martin Babička. The book Czechoslayvakia is an art catalog and guide to political imagination combining theoretical essays, fan fiction, and images that win the battle for attention in galleries and online: in scenes from the fictional Fourth Republic by artist and micro-influencer Jakub Polách, Karl Marx, Nicki Minaj, Nora Mojsejová, Klement Gottwald, and Sugar Denny.

📖 We Love Shooting –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Jiří Žák (ed.)
In 2023, a creative team consisting of the theater group 8lidí and artist Jiří Žák presented the theatrical production We Love Shooting at the Display Gallery, to which this publication is dedicated. It takes the production itself as a starting point for broader reflections on the play’s themes, such as the history of the Czechoslovak and Czech arms industry and its exports to countries of the Global South, or the close relationship with Syria during the era of real socialism. In addition to the author’s reflection on creative strategies in the creation of documentary theater that addresses complex issues, the book examines “our” attitude toward weapons, war, militarization, geopolitics, and refugeehood from the perspective of disciplines such as artistic research, historiography, the sociology of visual culture, and political science. We Love Shooting engages in a polemical dialogue with the notion of the Czech Republic as a non-violent, peaceful country inhabited by people with a “dove-like” nature. How does this notion align with the reality of a robust arms industry that has been a tradition in our country since the 19th century? What do we export abroad, and why? And where, exactly, does violence reside?

The book introduces the art protis technique and examines its development after the end of its so-called golden age. It focuses on the institutional, personal, and material conditions of its persistence through interviews with actors connected to studio operations, the privatization of the technology, attempts at its revival, and processes of museum collection-building. The second part is based on the author’s own experience of creating tapestries and combines diary-based reflection with a theoretical discussion of the relationship between machine production, craft, and contemporary art. Art protis is situated within a feminist framework of textile art, offering a critique of the aestheticized discourse of craft revival that neglects the socio-economic conditions of materiál production. The publication seeks to dismantle the opposition between technology and handwork and to position art protis within a broader socio-cultural, historical, and productive context.

This book captures an artistic research journey where photographer Barbora Trnková pushes posthumanist ideas into raw, lived terrain. Through her own glitchfeminist, intersectional lens, she takes aim at the hidden hegemonies baked into the metaprograms of today’s digital tech—hegemonies that the current boom in so-called “artificial intelligence” has only exaggerated and twisted into caricature. Here, technologies become sensors of the barely visible power structures shaping our lives and muting the voices that should be central to imagining any future worth living in—one that is meaningful, messy, and sensorially alive.