London Czech Centre uses arts to present modern image of Czech Republic
The London Czech Centre is located on the busy Great Portland Street, around five minutes walk from Oxford Circus. To escape from the noise at street level, I spoke to the centre's young director Tomas Zykan in the building's basement, and asked him just what it is that the Czech Centre does.
"The Czech Centre does very many things, but our main mission is to promote the Czech Republic in the UK. And when I say promote, probably a better wording would be to create a dialogue between the UK and the Czech Republic."
How do you go about doing that?
"We work mainly with arts and culture, because that's where we have a very strong reputation and that's also where we can start communicating with a wide public. So we work a lot with film, with architecture, with design, with literature, etcetera."
What kind of image of the Czech Republic are you hoping to put across? The centre here seems to me to be very modern.
"We try to update the image a little bit. The Czech Republic is [perceived as being] mainly Prague, and mainly kind of historical, medieval imagery of Prague Castle and the postcard kind of images. So we try to show what is going on in the contemporary Czech Republic and what kind of dynamics people can expect there. We try to highlight the more under-represented face of the Czech Republic."
Where we're sitting now - is this a gallery?
"Yeah, the space we use as a gallery, we use it as a lecture room, there are courses of Czech language..."
Do you have many Czech courses?
"We do, I'm amazed. We have three times a week, three courses a week and we probably have twenty people in every one of them."
Do you have a library here?
"We do have a library, but...(laughs) because we try to work with a British audience we are fairly selective in the books that we carry. They are mainly in English, they are about art, they are about photography, they are about architecture. They are not really literature in Czech for the Czechs."
Are you visitors mostly Czech or British?
"We're trying to reach out mainly to the younger British audience, so of course Czech audience of Czechs living in the UK, but we go mainly after the British. We try to work in a wide variety of different venues. We don't try to do everything in the Czech Centre, we work with London galleries, museums, cinemas and of course people outside London as well."
You can find more information about Mr Zykan's office and the other 16 Czech Centres around the world elsewhere on our website.
