Science Week at FFA, 19–22 Oct 2026

Science Week is a new educational format organised by the Department of Art History and Theory at FFA. For one week, the department will pause its regular teaching schedule and open its doors to voices from outside the faculty. Monday’s programme will take place at FFA and will be led by members of the Department of Art History and Theory. On the following days, the programme will move to the BUT Centre Tržnice and Cinema CIT, featuring lectures by invited experts and a discussion on art and class. Science Week does not have a single overarching theme, yet one motif will be present throughout a significant part of the programme: the people and the notion of the popular, and questions surrounding their relationship to culture and art.

Programme:

Monday, 19 October 2026

  • 12:00–14:00, lecture (open class), U1/314, Ladislav Jackson: National Style for Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia between the Wars and Empires
  • 14:00–16:00, screening of the film Code of Freaks followed by a discussion, U1/314, Zuzana Jakalová, Alyson Patsavas
  • 14:00–16:00, presentation, U1/202, Lenka Veselá: Publishing & Zines at FFA
  • 16:00–18:00, lecture (open class), U1/314, Jan Zálešák: Pop Art Theory on the Internet

Tuesday, 20 October 2026

  • 10:00–12:00, lecture, BUT Centre Tržnice, Marta Filipová: Our Folk Art, Your Folk Art
  • 14:00–16:00, lecture, BUT Centre Tržnice, Jiří Dynda: Inventing the Pagan Past in Visual Art
  • 17:00–18:00, book launch, BUT Centre Tržnice, Jiří Žák (ed.): We Love Shooting

Wednesday, 21 October 2026

  • 18:00–20:00, roundtable discussion, BUT Centre Tržnice, Class Back on the Scene: Why Is Cultural Criticism Returning to Questions of Class? Participants: Ivana Rumanová, Ondřej Špaček. Moderated by Zuzana Jakalová and Jirka Skála

Thursday, 22 October 2026

  • 10:00–12:00, lecture, BUT Centre Tržnice, Pavel Pospěch: Searching for Naturalness in an Alienated Society
  • 16:00–18:00, lecture, Cinema CIT, Whitney Davis: Pictures and Projection: A Brief History 1900–1950

Language: The programme will be held in Czech, except for Whitney Davis’s lecture, which will be delivered in English.

FFA BUT, Úvoz 33, Brno
BUT Centre Tržnice, Zelný trh 14, Brno
Cinema CIT, Radnická 4, Brno

Annotations:
National Style for Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia between the Wars and Empires
Ladislav Jackson (Department of Art History and Theory, FFA)
The dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 brought not only a fundamental change to the political order of Europe, but also the need to redefine the collective identities of the states that emerged from the ruins of the monarchy. The lecture will focus on Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, known as Yugoslavia from 1929 onwards, as three distinct examples of post-imperial state-building. It will examine the role played by architecture, fine and applied arts, visual communication and state representation in the cultural construction of the nation.

Publishing at FFA
Lenka Veselá (Department of Art History and Theory, FFA)
The programme will introduce publishing opportunities at FFA, from the publishing competition and book production within and beyond the publishing house’s editorial plan to the dissemination of artistic research through exhibitions on the FFA portal of the Research Catalogue platform and in the journal FFA Research in Art and Design (FFARAD). These formats enable artistic research to be presented in visually rich, multimedia and interdisciplinary forms.

Zines at FFA
Nina Böttcherová, Slová do prázdna and guests (FFA)
The session will introduce various forms of zine-making at FFA, from individual authorial projects to collective initiatives. It will feature the work of Nina Böttcherová and the collective Slová do prázdna, including their zine Dotyk mojej podstaty, as well as Poezin 02 by Viktórie Citráková, the work of doctoral student Eva Jaroňová and her forthcoming FFA zine library project, and other zine projects created at the faculty.

Code of the Freaks: Screening and Online Discussion with Alyson Patsavas
Zuzana Jakalová (Department of Art History and Theory, FFA)
The feature-length documentary Code of the Freaks (2020, 78 min) offers a radical rethinking of the way American cinema portrays people with disabilities. Hollywood continues to produce outdated clichés about disability and empty, supposedly inspirational stories that disability rights activists refer to as “inspiration porn.” Code of the Freaks—its title quoting Tod Browning’s classic 1932 film Freaks—offers a powerful corrective to these formulaic forms of entertainment, daring to imagine a cinematic landscape that takes people with disabilities seriously.

Pop Art Theory on the Internet
Jan Zálešák (Department of Art History and Theory, FFA)
A lecture with video excerpts exploring examples of digital content creators whose formative experiences were shaped by the art world. Brad Troemel and Joshua Citarella represent the post-internet generation that emerged in the United States around the turn of the 2010s, shaped both by the rise of social media and the effects of the financial crisis. Art Chad is a generation younger: an art-school dropout and YouTuber who returned to his native Canada after completing a bachelor’s degree in art in the United States. How do they work? What are their subjects? And are their “takes” relevant in Central Europe as well?

Our Folk Art, Your Folk Art
Marta Filipová (Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University)
Folk art can hardly be understood as a neutral symbol of the rural past. Nor is traditional folk dress merely a colourful reminder of a time when life was supposedly simpler and a sense of belonging taken for granted. Folk dress and traditions are now highly charged symbols claimed by communities, activists, artists and politicians across the political spectrum. But is this appropriation a recent phenomenon? The question of who is allowed to represent folk culture and for what purposes, who may wear traditional dress and who may not, is not merely rhetorical. It reflects the ways in which society constructs, reshapes and rewrites its own traditions and past. Drawing primarily on the history of the 20th century, the lecture will explore why folk art continues to provoke controversy. It will also ask to what extent folk culture is unique and regionally specific, and to what extent connections can be traced between forms of folk expression and art across different cultural and geographical contexts.
Marta Filipová is an art historian and theorist specialising in modern art and design. She works at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University, where she also heads the Centre for Modern Art and Theory. Her research focuses on questions of identity—political, national and gender identity—and their relationship to modern art and design.

Inventing the Pagan Past in Visual Art
Jiří Dynda (Slavic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
The lecture will explore how Central European visual art of the 19th and 20th centuries gradually shaped the image of the pagan past, and how the idea of an allegedly original, “native” and folk past was constructed through modern cultural and aesthetic conventions. Using selected examples from painting, illustration and sculpture, it will show which archaeological, ethnographic, manuscript, printed and even forged sources artists—predominantly Czech, Slovak and Polish—drew upon, and how stereotypical images of Slavic hillforts, deities, pagan sacrificial sites and rituals became established. The lecture will also examine the tensions between the local and the universal, the archaic and the modern, and the authentic and the forged that accompany these representations. Finally, it will briefly consider how the visual conventions that emerged in this way have been carried over into contemporary comics, film and video games, and how they continue to shape collective ideas about the pre-Christian past.
Jiří Dynda is a scholar of religion and historian of religion at the Slavic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses primarily on Slavic paganism. Last year, his book Bohové a bohyně starých Slovanů (Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Slavs) was published by Vyšehrad.

We Love Shooting
Jiří Žák (FFA)
A presentation of the book We Love Shooting, which is based on the theatre production of the same name staged in 2023 at Display Gallery by the group 8lidí and artist Jiří Žák. The publication develops the themes of the performance in a broader historical and social context, addressing the Czechoslovak and Czech arms industry, its exports to countries of the Global South, and relations with Syria during the period of state socialism. Drawing on artistic research, historiography, the sociology of visual culture and political science, the book explores attitudes towards weapons, war, militarisation, geopolitics and refugees, while challenging the idea of the Czech Republic as a peaceful country.

Class Back on the Scene: Why Is Cultural Criticism Returning to Questions of Class?
Participants: Ivana Rumanová, Ondřej Špaček
Moderated by: Zuzana Jakalová, Jirka Skála
The discussion will focus on a shift in recent years that has brought questions of class to the centre of cultural criticism. We will examine the reasons for this shift and its possible connections to the exhaustion of the concept of “culture wars”, changes in the nature of work, and the new distribution of capital in society. We will consider what we mean today when we speak about class and introduce current definitions of social class. We will also look at how questions of class are reflected in the structures of contemporary art.
Ivana Rumanová is a cultural critic, cultural worker and anthropologist. Her practice lies at the intersection of social sciences and contemporary art, to both of which she brings a genuine interest as well as deep scepticism. She was a member of the Otvorená kultúra platform and the committee of the Kultúrny štrajk initiative. She is chair of the Cultural Trade Unions and, until autumn 2026, a postdoctoral researcher at FaVU BUT in Brno.
Ondřej Špaček is a sociologist at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. His research focuses on social inequalities, cultural capital and class reproduction in contemporary Czech society. He studies the social dimensions of cultural consumption and the role of educational and cultural institutions in shaping and legitimising cultural hierarchies. He is a co-author of Pravidla vkusu: Jak se společnost rozhoduje, co je v kultuře hodnotné (Rules of Taste: How Society Decides What Is Valuable in Culture, 2024).

Searching for Naturalness in an Alienated Society
Pavel Pospěch (Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University)
What appears natural to us, and what appears artificial? This is a boundary we repeatedly encounter in both art and the social sciences. Ideas of the “natural” or “real” world are often associated in social discourse with nature, locally rooted ways of life, or common sense. The lecture will examine how these ideas developed against the backdrop of the modern polarisation between rural and urban environments. In the second part, drawing on examples from empirical research, we will consider how these concepts are understood in the Czech Republic today, what meanings we attach to them, and how they shape our everyday experience.
Pavel Pospěch teaches sociology at Masaryk University and is a member of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His research focuses on culture, social transformations and rural areas. He is the author of the acclaimed book Neznámá společnost (The Unknown Society, 2021), and his new book Osamělí hrdinové (Lonely Heroes) was published this year.

Pictures and Projection: A Brief History 1900–1950
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley)
Images do not merely depict the external world; they also bring scenes from the inner psychological world to the surface. Around 1920, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and anthropologists began using images to gain insight into the deepest feelings and thoughts of their creators and viewers, particularly as a tool in the treatment of mental illness. By 1935, “projective testing” techniques had taken on a formalised form and began to be widely used around the world in hospitals, schools, courtrooms and other social contexts. The lecture examines the complex and controversial history of using images to identify and alleviate psychological conflicts.
Whitney Davis is a theorist and art historian who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 2001. His wide-ranging research interests include the visual culture of non-normative sexuality, the history of prehistoric and ancient art in North Africa and the Mediterranean, European Neoclassical sculpture, and the relationship between art history, archaeology and anthropology.

Author Mgr. Tímea Vitázková
Published
Short URL https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d371887

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