Refracted Memory: Dissent, Trauma and Affective Politics in Stanislav Libenský’s and Jaroslava Brychtová’s Glass Sculptures in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1968-1980

Drawing on years of archival research and artist interviews conducted in the Czech Republic for a larger project investigating intersections between trauma, political dissent and modernism in postwar Czechoslovakian monumental glass sculptures by partners Stanislav Libenský (1922-2002) and Jaroslava Brychtová (b. 1924), this paper mobilizes critical revaluation of the performative role of haunting in their glassworks, expressing trauma as a means of dissent and establishing the crucial role the decorative, transparent and empty played in dissent practices. Building on Central European concepts of dissent as efforts to open spaces for critical thinking and expressing feelings Communism prohibited, I argue dissent—as the negotiation of refracted memory—manifested in objects, public processes of glassmaking and affective responses the works generated. Establishing the critical role of glass’s material properties of refraction, transparency and emptiness in dissent practices, this paper focuses on the artists' monumental glass sculpture protesting the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia displayed at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, River of Life (1968-1970). In analyzing the hidden-in-plain-sight, refracted affective traces of trauma haunting their work, the paper identifies how the artists negotiated politics by appearing to retreat from it and revealed memory by refracting/obscuring it. In doing so, I demonstrate that Czechoslovakian glass sculpture compels us to redefine what constitutes the political work of avant-garde modernism. The larger project repositions glassworks as contributors to modernism’s multiple centers, challenging Western art historical narratives and posits glassworks as haunted sites of modernity requiring a reparative reading of the complexities of dissent under Communism.