Performative Haunted Sites of Modernity: Affective Dissent and Transgenerational Haunting in Stanislav Libenský’s and Jaroslava Brychtová’s Monumental Public Glass Sculptures in Communist Czechoslovakia

Investigating intersections between trauma, dissent and modernism in postwar Czechoslovakian public monumental sculptures by glass artists and partners Stanislav Libenský (1922-2002) and Jaroslava Brychtová (1924-2020), this paper mobilizes critical revaluation of the performative role of haunting in their glassworks, expressing trauma as a means of dissent residing in the artists’ experiences of living under the Communist regime in the early years of normalization that continues to circulate in the present. Focusing on Friendship of Nations (1970-1972) commissioned for the former Federal Assembly in Prague, Czechoslovakia, I investigate how the artists manipulated glass’s material properties of transparency and refraction and formalist language to transmit what I define as affective dissent—expressing feelings not publicly tolerated under the Communist regime (figs. 1-3). Thinking with the concept of haunting as a framework identifying ways in which defunct abusive systems of power reenact unresolved social violence in the present (Avery) and scholarship on transgenerational haunting whereby unresolved trauma passes through generations (Abraham and Torok), I articulate how affective legacies from traumatic experiences under Communism expressed in Friendship of Nations still circulate in the present. Complicating the simplistic, but common perception of Friendship of Nations as an artistically and ethically bankrupt symbolic remnant of the Communist era, I argue its affective dissent makes it a haunted site of modernity urgently imploring us to foster new types of encounters that stimulate reparative work of expanding concepts of dissent and acknowledging trauma to achieve a more nuanced understanding of living conditions under Communism and its lingering legacies today.