SMArt Talks: Connected by Design

2026

This spring, SMArt Talks will explore design not merely as a matter of form, but as a powerful system for producing connections, knowledge, and cultural meaning across the 20th century. The lectures in Czech, Slovak and English bring together perspectives from graphic design history, media studies, anthropology, and art history. The series examines how visual and material practices shape networks of people, disciplines, and political worlds.

The opening lectures focus on the interwar avant-garde, tracing how experimental typography, magazine design, and visual diagramming created new transnational communities and ways of imagining cultural exchange. From the network diagrams of European avant-garde periodicals, presented by Merse Pál Szeredi, to Klára Prešnajderová’s lecture on the bold functionalism of New Typography in Central Europe, design emerges as an active agent in the reorganisation of communication, perception, and social life in a rapidly modernising world. Shifting to the Cold War period with Alison Clarke, the series then addresses the global expansion of design as a geopolitical instrument, examining how industrial design and anthropological methods were mobilised to reshape local material cultures within the ideological framework of Western development. Finally, the programme turns to the singular work of Anna Zemánková, presented by Lada Hubatová-Vacková, whose deeply personal and unconventional artistic practice challenges established categories of art history and raises fundamental questions about interpretation, authorship, and the limits of disciplinary frameworks.

The lectures invite us to reconsider design as a serious concern of academic interest and a field that not only reflects the world, but actively participates in making it. They also serve as an enticing prelude to the upcoming Design History Society conference, which takes place at the Department of Art History in September 2026 and is co-organised by our centre.