New Identita exhibition: an amazing world of Czech graphic design
With three floors and hundreds of exhibits, Identita is a new absorbing and eye-catching exhibition at Museum Kampa – and it is only one part of the overall project. Identita is in fact a multi-genre experience, which also comprises a series on Czech Television’s iVysílání service, a feature-length documentary, and a book that accompanies the exhibition.
“Is graphic design an art or a design?” “Does graphic design have its icons and legends?” “How do you recognise good graphic design?” These are the kind of questions that the new Identita exhibition at Museum Kampa seeks to answer. It engages visitors with a vibrant and interactive experience, and it shines a new light on some very familiar examples of Czech iconography. I went along to a special guided tour at the museum, ahead of Identita’s official opening on October 12th, and spoke to one of the curators: the design theorist Linda Kudrnovská. She, it is safe to say, lives and breathes graphic design:
“We have been working on the project for seven years, I would say. But it's a part of a longer experience. We had a typography magazine that was published in Prague, bilingually, for over ten years. It was called Typo. So typography and graphic design are basically my life.”
The project has been a long time in the making; Ms. Kudrnovská explained how the whole ‘world’ of Identita came about.
“Well, originally, the idea was to create a TV series of seven episodes, but we had a very naive idea of what cooperation with big institutions would look like. We thought it would be ready within like two years or something. But the whole process took us seven years, to get the TV series to the Czech television, and then to publish the book, and produce the movie, and organise this exhibition.”
The route around the exhibits begins on the ground floor of one of the buildings of Museum Kampa. The story begins with the birth of Czechoslovakia, and showcases designs for key icons of the new state, like the Czechoslovak flag itself. It leads the viewer through the imagery and styles of the first Czechoslovak republic, the Nazi-occupied protectorate, the communist era, and then up to the Velvet Revolution. Another room displays famous pieces of Czech public design, from the painted signs that mark tourist trails, to the symbolism of the Prague Metro. All around that room, the walls display instantly recognisable logos of well-known Czech companies and of specific municipalities across the country. Posters, books, film and television fill the rooms upstairs. The exhibition, which runs until February 2nd next year, successfully impresses on the visitor just how much graphic design there is in the world, and how we so often take it for granted.
Among the many rooms of exhibits, I asked what, if any, might be the curator’s favourite:
“It's very hard to say, of course, but if I have to mention one, I would say it's one particular book on the third floor in the very corner. And it's a book by Józef Báchal, who was a Czech writer and a painter. This book he himself wrote, designed, illustrated, and actually the whole book weighs twenty kilos. He produced, I think, twenty copies of those, and we have one of them here at the exhibition.”
The exhibition is a rich celebration of graphic design within Czechia and Czechoslovakia, but Ms. Kudrnovská also stressed the international aspect to the exhibits, and discussed the Czech contribution to the wider world of design:
“This is something that we that we really wanted to discover within this project. Of course, due to political regimes in Czechoslovakia, starting 1939 and ending 1989, the possibilities of the Czech designers to influence the world were limited slightly. Before that we had designers and artists such as Alphonse Mucha or Vojtěch Preissig, who lived and worked abroad. So, we have that long tradition.
“For me, the best discovery of this whole project is that the current type designers and graphic designers from the Czech Republic consider themselves Europeans. They do not really care about where they come from; they assume that the origin the country of origin is not really important, although they are very well aware of their roots and the tradition of Czech graphic and type design.”
