Meghan Forbes
Technologies for the Revolution:
The Czech Avant-Garde in Print
23. 9. 2025 at 6PM
in the CCA Prague auditorium/café
The most influential avant-garde group in interwar Czechoslovakia called for a revolution enacted via print. Devětsil, founded in 1920 and comprised of leftist artists, architects, actors, and poets, undertook an ambitious publishing effort, aiming to reach urban individuals on the street and in their homes in the years following the First World War. It was a revolution that explicitly condemned any call to arms; instead, it proposed taking up new technologies that expanded possibilities for the photomechanical reproduction and dissemination of text and image in print. This utopic vision was embodied in thousands of physical revolutions made by the machine of the printing press.
Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print offers a cultural history of print that engages questions of labor and capital embedded in material culture and in the history of the book. This new inquiry offers a nuanced portrait of leftist art practices in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period and charts networks of exchange across Europe by exploring the ways in which Devětsil used its printed matter. The Czech -ism of Poetism is articulated as a sustained working through of Devětsil’s position as the group aimed to accommodate both new technology and the role of poets and artists in a postwar society, all while striving for a socialist utopia. Technologies for the Revolution is the result of nearly a decade of research conducted in the libraries and archives of Prague, Berlin, Paris, and New York, and also draws from close work with museum and private collections. Conceived as an exhibition space in print, this book sheds new light on Devětsil and Poetism, as well as on the group’s social and artistic activities through an object-based analysis of various media—architecture, typography, poetry, photography, film, and performance—to propose a more synthetic and variegated understanding of Devětsil’s unique contribution to the European avant-gardes.
The event is organised by the Artefactum publisher in collaboration with the CCA Prague
It will be held in English
Free entry
Dr. Meghan Forbes works as a writer, researcher, curator, translator, and gardener. She is the editor of the volume International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019), and her writings on art have appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogs on the artists Lucia Moholy (Kunsthalle Praha and Hatje Cantz, 2024), Toyen (National Gallery Prague, 2020), Alice Trumbull Mason (Rizzoli, 2020), and Władysław Strzemiński (Centre Pompidou and Skira, 2018). Additional texts have appeared in Art Margins, Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, post (MoMA), Umění, and elsewhere. Forbes is also the founder and coeditor of harlequin creature, an imprint of handmade books and magazines produced with many of the printing techniques discussed on these pages. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print is her first monograph. A second, on the dancer, choreographer, activist, and cultural worker Míra Holzbachová, is in process.
The CCA programs are possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7, GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Media support: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, artalk.cz, Radio1
