Events: September 2023
August 2023
October 2023
Debate N: How to Speak and Write About Contemporary Science
September 5, 2023, 19:00
Scientific discoveries change our world more, and faster, than ever before, often acting as a direct force that shapes policy. At the same time, the distrust and rejection of science by sections of society is on the rise. Can anything be done about that? How to popularise contemporary science and explain its findings and its limitations? More
Echo from the Library: Censorship in a Time of Freedom
September 6, 2023, 19:00
We live in a society that considers the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression to be fundamental rights. However, doubts about the real extent of our freedom of expression are growing. What are the biggest enemies of free speech today? Political correctness? The algorithms of social networks? Grant mechanisms in the arts? More
Presentation of Libido by Belarusian Novelist Illya Sin
September 7, 2023, 19:00
Belarusian author Illya Sin (1978) is a key figure in the country’s cultural life, especially as a novelist and performance artist. He is a member of the Minsk-based group BumBamLit and the Theatre of Psychic Imbalance, and is the author of Broken Puppets, Fiction and other books. His 2018 novel Libido is a major work of what is referred to as “new Belarusian prose”. The plot of the parable, the atmosphere of which brings to mind the films of Tarkovsky, is set in a post-Soviet city during a time of war, a precursor to the war in Ukraine that has been going on since 2014. A sex worker, Marie, moves to the city, her profession threatened by the latest technology... will she find a way out of despair, apathy and omnipresent destruction? More
9/11 Legacies and the Global War on Terror
September 8, 2023, 14:00
As the formal infrastructure of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) retracts, the social relations, logics, and material resources from the planetary war are set to shape our collective futures. This event brings together an array of scholars who will reflect on some of the enduring legacies of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. The event is guided by one overarching question: In what ways will our post-GWOT era be shaped by the Global War on Terror? More
Debate with Respekt: The Inconvenient Cop
September 12, 2023, 19:00
No movies can match the investigation of corruption and the mafia in Czechia in the 1990s and 2000s. Investigative journalist Jaroslav Spurný has written a book on the subject entitled Nepohodlný policajt (The Inconvenient Cop), comprising a long interview with Zdeněk Macháček, a key figure in the police’s campaign against the dark side. Much of what is discussed carries over into the present day. Jaroslav Spurný, Zdeněk Macháček and Jana Klímová. Ondřej Kundra will moderate.
Planting Fire: Forty-Five Years of Svatava Antošová’s Poetry
September 13, 2023, 19:00
Various influences in the numerator: from underground and pataphysics through expressive folklore to almost romantically cut landscape lyrics. And in the denominator, the same caskets: comedy, eroticism and criticism. Simply a poet of unique imagination and inner strength. The poetry collection will be introduced by the author, in conversation with its editor, Radim Kopáč, and a number of surprise guests. Sázení ohně (Planting Fire) is published by Paper Jam with illustrations by Michal Matzenauer.
The Free Academy: Michal Pěchouček
September 14, 2023, 19:00
Artificial Intelligence Today and Tomorrow: A Debate on Societal Impact More
Different City Experience with the Václav Havel Library
September 16, 2023, 11:00 Participation on local events
This year once again the Václav Havel Library will take part in the neighbourhood festival Different City Experience, organised by the AutoMat association. During the daylong programme you will find our stand with books, posters and other essentials on the nearby Opatovická St., while an exhibition of Václav Havel’s Anticodes will be held in the garden on V Jirchářích.
Václav Havel: Hunt for a Pig
September 18, 2023, 19:00
This almost forgotten dialogue written by Václav Havel in 1987 is an amusing anecdote about how Václav Havel in his dissident days tried to obtain an animal for a pig-killing that friends from the dissent were meant to attend. Performed by the Dokola theatre company. More
Memorial Evening for Vlado Milunić, Czechia’s Best-Known Croat
September 25, 2023, 19:00
17 September 2023 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Vlado Milunić, a Czech architect of Croatian origin. He was born in Zagreb, but spent most of his life in Prague, having moved there in 1956 to join his parents, who had remained in the city as political emigrants in the late 1940s. After studying at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague, he spent several years as an intern in Paris. After returning to Czechoslovakia in 1969, he collaborated with Jan Línek on social buildings for more than 20 years. After the Velvet Revolution he founded his own Studio VM (Volné myšlenky, or Free Thinking). His best known work is the Dancing House, AKA Ginger and Fred, on the embankment Rašínovo nábřeží in Prague, but his architectural oeuvre is much larger in scope. He received numerous awards and honours, most recently in 2019 from the president of the Republic of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović. More