Name: Destabilized Places of Memory: Hudeček’s Painting from the Perspective of Visual Literacy
Start: 2026-10-07T14:00:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T14:30:00-0400

Destabilized Places of Memory: Hudeček’s Painting from the Perspective of Visual Literacy

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Aleš Hudeček’s painting opens the problem of memory where the image does not preserve the past as a reconstructable event but organizes it through destabilized place. Rooms, façades, staircases, patterned partitions, decorative floors, sculptural residues, and figures remain clearly recognizable, yet they do not consolidate into one stable site, one historical layer, or one closed narrative. Destabilized place names a situation in which spatial cues remain descriptively strong while staying referentially unsettled.
Against this material, the question becomes what form visual literacy may take when the image remains visually exact but referentially unclosed. Visual literacy is therefore not reduced to the simple ability to ‘read’ an image; it is approached as a practice of seeing that distinguishes among recognition, spatial testing, historical inference, and return to the material surface of painting. Hudeček’s works make it possible to observe why the question of visual literacy becomes especially acute when an image offers many culturally legible cues while resisting rapid interpretive stabilization.
Late-modern and late-socialist design elements enter here into tension with ornamental and baroque-monumental residues. In the Czech context, such forms carry not only stylistic memory but also historiographic and ideological burden. The image thus does not function as a document of one recoverable past, but as a field in which different temporal regimes, experiences, and visual habits collide. Hudeček’s figurative painting therefore opens a productive space for the theory and teaching of visual literacy whenever memory, place, and representation remain in lasting tension without definitive closure.

Speakers

Tomáš Koudela

assistant professor and vice-dean, University of Ostrava

Tomáš Koudela is an assistant professor and Vice-Dean for Communication and Creative Activities at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava. He serves as the head of the Visual Studies Centre and leads the interdisciplinary Visual Literacy Research Team. His research focuses... Read More →

Timotej Blažek

postdoctoral researcher, University of Ostrava

Mgr. Timotej Blažek, Ph.D. (*1989) is an art educator and theorist in the field of art education. Since 2022, he has been working at the National Institute of Education and Youth, focusing on research and development in the educational area of Art and Culture, particularly art education... Read More →

Tereza Čapandová

researcher assistant, University of Ostrava

Tereza Čapandová is a research assistant at the Faculty of Education, University of Ostrava, and a member of the Visual Literacy Research Team. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in Art Education, focusing on the concept of originality in the context of post-production theory... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall

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IVLA 2026 Charleston

Tomáš Koudela

Timotej Blažek

Tereza Čapandová

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IVLA 2026 Charleston

Tomáš Koudela

Timotej Blažek

Tereza Čapandová

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