Lecture Pavel Büchler - What the Cleaners Found

Pavel Büchler will give a public lecture on samizdat publishing and its influence on his art and writing practice. Samizdat was a method of small-scale clandestine production and circulation of literature in Eastern Europe in the 1960 to 1980s that sought to evade the censor and helped to maintain a will to resist intellectual stagnation and hopelesness. Although the samizdat method is now practically outdated, its spirit can still be reactivated as a critical tool in the settings and regimes of contemporary institutions as Büchler has done, for instance, in a set of small publications, What the Cleaners Found, produced while he was working as Head of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art in the late 1990s. 

Pavel Büchler

An artist, teacher and occasional writer, Pavel Büchler, was born in Prague. In 1981 he emigrated to Britain and lives in Manchester. He writes on contemporary art, photography, film and art education, has co-edited several anthologies of critical writing, and is the author of Ghost Stories: Stray Thoughts on Photography and Film (1999). A selection of his writing since 1986, Somebody's Got to Do It, was published by Ridinghouse, London, in 2016. 

The event is organised in collaboration with Maria-Christa Lerm Hayes and Maria Fusco.