Marble Rooms of the Moravian Museum
15 October 2025 – 19 April 2026
The Marble Rooms of the Moravian Museum are home to an exhibition called Rays of Freedom. British Support for Brno Dissent in the 1980s. Curators from the Department of Anti-Totalitarian Cultural History (ODKAZ) present the story of solidarity between the British and the people of Brno. Its roots go back to 1980, when an organization called the Jan Hus Educational Foundation was founded in Oxford, which systematically provided material and intellectual support to Czechoslovak dissent. In Brno, the cooperation began in 1981, the first home seminar was held in December 1984, and mutual cooperation lasted without interruption until the Velvet Revolution. In 1990, the Czechoslovak Jan Hus Educational Foundation was established in Brno, and it continues its activities under the name Jan Hus Educational Foundation to this day.
The exhibition Rays of Freedom focuses on events in Brno over a five-year period in the second half of the 1980s. It presents important areas in which the British provided material and intellectual assistance to Brno's unofficial cultural world. Thanks to the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, British academics were able to visit and give lectures in private homes during the period of normalization. The British also helped in the sphere of samizdat, video screenings of foreign films banned or unavailable in Czechoslovakia, and supported independent Brno artists in the fields of music and fine arts. The exhibition and its catalogue present topics to which historians have not yet paid the attention they deserve. They reveal not only the gaps in Brno's cultural history, but also the strong bonds of British-Czech cooperation in the persistent search for a path to freedom.
