Arts | All stories

In this week's Arts, Dita Asiedu visits an exhibition of portraits drawn and painted by Jewish artist Emil Orlik featuring personalities such as Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Albert Einstein. We also look at a festival organised by the National Theatre, introducing music and theatre companies of the Czech Republic's minorities...

If you go to Bratislavska Street, just outside the old centre of Brno, you'll find a museum that is unique of its kind in the Czech Republic. Amid the crumbling tenement blocks of one of Brno's most neglected inner-city districts, the Museum of Romani Culture, at number 67, is a den of activity. The museum's aim is to map the fascinating, sometimes tragic and often misunderstood history of the Romany minority here in the Czech Lands.

Welcome to the Arts. 2004 has been designated as the Year of Czech Music and will be marked with concerts, exhibitions, and festivals around the country. The reason - this year the Czech Republic commemorates as many as 60 anniversaries of important composers, musicians and music organisations. And some of those anniversaries fell on this week.

Ten years ago, on March 3rd, 1994, just four years after the collapse of communist rule, one of the icons of anti-communist resistance died at the age of fifty. Folk singer Karel Kryl emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation but clandestine copies of his records circulated among people till the very end of the communist regime.

In this week's edition of the Arts, we look at a unique way in which children in refugee camps are helped to adjust to their new environment. First, though, some of the stories making headlines in Czech arts and culture:

What do the films Amadeus, Mission Impossible, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have in common? They were filmed in the Czech Republic, which in the last few years has attracted numerous foreign production companies offering them low production costs and professional staff. But until January 1st this year, the country has not had an official, centralised body that provided all information necessary to facilitate film-making. Thanks to the Audiovisual Producers' Association (APA), the Czech Film Commission was established, expanding the

Prague's Art Factory Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition with a name that's certain to grab everyone's attention: "Tento mesic menstruuji" or "I'm Having My Period This Month".

Welcome to the programme. This week we take you to an unusual exhibition - a bold and daring endeavour and certainly nothing for the squeamish. But first of all we bring you the latest in the world of art in the Czech Republic.

In this week's Arts, we hear all about composer and performing artist Jaroslav Krcek, and travel to the picturesque little village of Karlstejn, west of Prague, where a brand new House of Clocks recently opened to the public:

Tuesday this week was Holocaust Remembrance Day in many countries. To mark the occasion the Czech premiere of the oratorio the Song of Terezin was held at Prague's State Opera. The Song of Terezin was written by Franz Waxman and is based on poems written by children interned at the Terezin ghetto, around 60 kilometres north of Prague. The Nazis tried to portray Theresienstadt as it was known in German as a model camp, though less than one in ten of the Jews sent there survived. Among those who did was Alena Munkova-Synkova.