Cosmos, Fiction, and Transcendence: Photography and Conceptual Art in Communist Bratislava

• In Event: “Normalizing” Czechoslovak Cultural Production: 1968-1989

Abstract

The paper analyses the development of Conceptual Art in Bratislava during ‘Normalization’ (1968–1989) through the work of Július Koller, Rudolf Sikora and Ľubomír Ďurček. Despite difficult conditions for art production, Conceptual Art formed an escape valve for the artists’ political vindications, manifested through puns, parody, irony, metaphors and elaborate cosmological fictions expressed as utopian and dystopian projections of political and cultural reality. Photography—through its reduced size, low cost and indexical qualities—formed the most suitable medium to materialize such conceptual practices.

Author

• Paula Gortázar, U of Westminster (UK)