Czech historiography views the term normalization primarily as a designation of the process which after the forcible suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 was to completely eliminate the influence of the political and intellectual elites who stood behind the revitalization endeavours in Czechoslovakia. Normalization tends to be connected with political purges, another wave of emigration, censorship, oppression and restrictions of all kinds. Another connotation which the term normalization invokes is the effort by the party leadership to ensure saturation of communist consumer society with the massive construction of prefab housing estates, car manufacture and the production of TV entertainment programmes. On the other hand, this period can also be perceived as a big social experiment which brought a huge portion of the population into changed living and social conditions to which it was necessary to respond - both on the part of the people themselves and party functionaries and experts. This process of coming to terms with and searching for a living content of the enforced form in the field of architecture and the applied and fine arts is the subject of the coming exhibition entitled Paneland.
A reflection of the relationship with concrete panel buildings and of the changing approach to living in them is provided by works of art which address this subject. We wanted to find exhibits that would will illustrated the uninviting and lethargic environment of the housing estates at the time of their construction of the Moravian Gallery showed itself to be perfectly suited to this purpose as it contains works which in the meantime have become iconic comments on that period. At the exhibition, the generation growing up on a housing estate that has attempted to narrate their panel block experience in new terms is presented by the artists Josef Bolf, Jiří Černický, Tomáš Džadoň, Katarína Hládeková, Jan Pfeiffer, Michael Rittstein, Jan Šrámek, Maxim Velčovský, Jan Wolf.
Professional collaboration: Ondřej Chrobák, Jana Kořínková, Marika Kupková, Marian Lipták, Jiří Pátek, Lukáš Pecka, Jana Písaříková, Marta Sylvestrová, Markéta Žáčková
Authors interventions: Jiří Černický, Vojtěch Pecka, Jan Šrámek, Maxim Velčovský
Multimedia intervention: Filip Cenek, Michal Kindernay
The exhibition is held with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the CR and the City of Brno. It si part of celebrations commemorating important events in Czech history (1918, 1968, 1993) marked by the year 2018 and part of the project
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