Identity survival

Fast-paced presentation of turns and twists of graphic design in Poland in the 20^th and 21^st century is an attempt to provide stylistic and historical context to the developments in this area. The audience will be guided through the birth of “national style” and its avant-garde rivals, early mass-media designing and the formation of high-brow, socialist esthetics vs. authoritarian, militarized communication design of the 1920s and 1930s, the postwar “battle of book covers” and the birth of eclectic “Polish Poster School”. The visual rhetoric of the real-socialist state will be juxtaposed with individual visual languages of the political and cultural opposition – closing with a discussion of the visual communication landscape after the capitalist deluge of marketing imagery.