This semester's SMArt Talks trace how photography and print media became instruments through which modernity was imagined, contested, and institutionalised across the 20th century. Moving between interwar Prague, provincial Bohemia, colonial Africa, and the international poster biennial circuit, the four lectures share a concern with the apparatus of modern visual culture – the schools, museums, and exhibitions that trained eyes, shaped canons, and determined whose images and whose innovations would be remembered.
Matthew Rampley opens the cycle with Josephine Baker's 1928 tour of Central Europe, showing how jazz and Black performance became a screen onto which Czechoslovak avant-gardists projected their own ideas of technology, Americanisation, and the modern. Petra Trnková turns to a domestic and pedagogical register, recovering the largely forgotten figure of Rudolf Gilbert and the teaching collections of the Prague State School of Graphic Arts, reminding us that the history of photography is made as much in classrooms and archives as in galleries. Hannin Hanouch shifts the frame to Weltmuseum Wien's ethnographic holdings, using photographs of firearms to dismantle the colonial fiction of the "defenceless" native and to expose how photography and the arms trade were entangled instruments of empire and resistance alike. Wiktor Komorowski closes the semester by tracing the Brno Biennale's place within a global network of graphic art exhibitions, following the international contacts and rivalries that turned poster design into a genuinely transnational Cold War-era enterprise.
Across jazz clubs, teaching cabinets, museum vitrines, and biennial juries, a common question emerges – who controls the image of modernity, and at what cost to those it depicts, trains, or excludes?
