26. 2. 2024 Seminar of Accidental Wisdom: Meghan Forbes
seminar of accidental wisdom: Meghan Forbes
26. 2. 2025
“Bože můj vždyt’ je to moje vysněná Jáva”:
Konstantin Biebl’s Poetic and Photographic Reflections from Indonesia
In late 1926, the poet Konstantin Biebl set sail from Genoa, Italy on the German ship York, arriving in Java some weeks later via the Dutch Plancius. When he returned to Czechoslovakia at the beginning of 1927, he brought home with him photographs, ideas for poems and feuilletons, as well as objects (such as stage puppets and a batik). Biebl was a member of the Czechoslovak communist party and a critic of European colonialism, and he arrived in Java concurrent with the communist rebellion there, though none of this is much in evidence in what he brought back with him. Some of his photographs and short writings were soon published in the popular travel paper Domov a svět; perhaps the most famous outcome of his trip, the poetry volume S lodí jež dováží čaj a kávu, is illustrated not with photographic reproductions, but Karel Teige’s typomontages. This talk, which presents research from the forthcoming book Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print, presents images from Biebl’s collection of photographs related to his transcontinental journey and puts forward an argument that his archives and publishing output from the late 1920s present a rather uncritical repetition of tropes of colonial representation, rather than resistance.
Meghan Forbes works as a writer, researcher, curator, translator, and gardener. Her forthcoming monograph Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print (Artefactum and Karolinum/University of Chicago) offers a nuanced portrait of leftist art practices in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period and explores the ways in which the Devětsil group utilized the production of printed matter to forge networks of exchange across Europe. In 2024, she was co-curator of Lucia Moholy: Exposures at the Kunsthalle Prague. Forbes is the editor of the volume International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) and her writings on art have appeared in monographs and exhibition catalogues on the artists Alice Trumbull Mason (Rizzoli, 2020), Lucia Moholy (Kunsthalle Prague and Hatje Cantz, 2024), Toyen (National Gallery Prague, 2020), and Władysław Strzemiński (Centre Pompidou and Skira, 2018). Additional texts have appeared in Umění, Art Margins, post (MoMA), Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and held postdoctoral fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Image caption: Unattributed photograph of Konstantin Biebl at Borobudur Temple, c. 1926. Literární archiv, Památník národního písemnictví