COURAGE

Mbledhje koleksionesh

Taiga Kokneviča is the deputy director of the Museum of the Occupation in Latvia, and the main curator of the museum. She has taken part personally in building up the collection, in preparing exhibitions of paintings by Kurts Fridrihsons, and to popularise the collection on other occasions. As the main curator, she has also described the content and the use of the collection in connection with the 'Action of Light’ (donations by Paulis Kļaviņš and Ģederts Melngailis), and the review ‘Auseklis’ (donation by Vaira Strautniece).

Vesna Kolarić Kišur was born in Zagreb in 1925. She is the second wife of Rudi Supek and was the owner of his archive after his death in 1993. She continued to collect materials related to her late husband. After her death in Zagreb in 2004, the Rudi Supek archive was inherited by Supek’s descendants from his first marriage (his daughter Olga Supek). In the Rudi Supek Personal Papers at the Croatian State Archives, there are documents related to Vesna Kolarić Kišur, which includes her correspondence with Rudi Supek and others.

The work of Jiří Kolář covered two areas of interest. He was a poet, and his work was close to Skupina 42. He is the author of Prometheus’s Liver, as a result of which he was sentenced to several months in prison in 1952. Alongside his poetry, he also made collages (or as he calls them, proláže, roláže, muchláže). Thanks to them, he became internationally recognized. His work was presented at Documenta in Kassel (1968), at the biennale of Sao Paolo (1969) and in the 1970s and 1980s his work was frequently shown at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Kolář lived in Czechoslovakia until 1979. After a year-long fellowship in Western Berlin, he moved to Paris. This change was not approved by the Czechoslovak authorities, and he stayed in Paris illegally. In 1984 Kolář received French citizenship. He returned to Prague in 1999.

Kolář was important not only as an artist, but also as someone who built communities. He was part of Skupina 42, Umělecká beseda and Křižovatka. After his release from prison in 1953, he started a tradition of the so-called Kolář’s table in Café Slavia (Prague) where independent intellectuals and artists gathered.

Běla Kolářová worked with photography (photograms) and collage. Her interest in experimentation and found objects was, for a long time, less appreciated than the work of her husband Jiří Kolář. This has changed in recent years. Her works were exhibited for the first time in 1962 in Mánes, and then she joined the group Křižovatka and exhibited with them. Běla Kolářová, together with her husband, left Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s for Berlin, and then for Paris. In 1981, she came to Prague for a short visit, but the police did not allow her to return to her husband until 1985. Since 1999 she lived in Prague. She was autodidact.