Mgr. Ondřej Táborský, Ph.D.
Ondřej Táborský has long been interested in the intersections of history and culture. As a curator at the National Museum in Prague, he has contributed to a number of exhibitions and publishes both academic and journalistic texts on museology and contemporary exhibition practice. In his historical research, he focuses on consumer culture and the visuality of socialist Czechoslovakia. For several years, he worked with an interdisciplinary team on research into advertising production in the post-war period, supported by the Czech Science Foundation. The research resulted in the publication The Consumer Imagination of State Socialism: Advertising in Czechoslovakia 1948–1989.
In recent years, his work has increasingly focused on questions of cultural sustainability and on how contemporary global challenges can be addressed through exhibitions. He contributes to the Kompost newsletter, published by Creative Europe and the National Institute for Culture, and helped establish the Environmental Humanities Prague research platform at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He has also been actively fostering collaboration between the academic, cultural and non-profit sectors in addressing global social and environmental issues.
Grants
- 2018 – 2020 – Principal Investigator of the project Spotřební imaginace komunistické diktatury. Československá reklama v poválečném období (Consumer Imagination of the Communist Dictatorship: Czechoslovak Advertising in the Post-War Period) – National Museum (nm.cz)
Exhibitions
- 2022 – 2023 – ZeMě (Earth is Me), co-author
- 2019 – 2020 – Sametová revoluce. Říká se jí sametová (Velvet Revolution. They Call It Velvet), co-author
- 2016 – 2017 – Druhý život husitství (The Second Life of the Hussite Movement), author
- 2012 – 2013 – 20 Years of the Czech Republic – for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, author
- 2011 – 2012 – Rudá muzea (Red Museums), co-author
Selected Academic Publications
Books
- Ondřej Táborský – Lucie Česálková (et al.), Spotřební imaginace státního socialismu: reklama v Československu 1948–1989 (The Consumer Imagination of State Socialism: Advertising in Czechoslovakia 1948–1989). Prague: National Museum, 2022. 503 pp. ISBN 978-80-7036-710-0.
Articles and Studies
- Chráníme, pečujeme, zvelebujeme. Plakáty s environmentální tematikou v době státního socialismu (Protecting, Caring, Improving: Environmental Posters under State Socialism), Acta Historia, Vol. 79, Nos. 3–4/2025, pp. 71–84.
- Chůze velrybou. Imerzní výstavní design jako forma muzejní komunikace (Walking Through a Whale: Immersive Exhibition Design as a Form of Museum Communication), Iluminace, No. 3 (2023), pp. 39–58.
- Krásky v mlžném oparu. Erotický akt v pozdně socialistické reklamě (Beauties in a Hazy Mist: The Erotic Nude in Late Socialist Advertising), in: Umění LXIX, No. 3, 2021, pp. 283–297.
- From Advertising to Propaganda and Back Again. Advertising Production during the First Decade of the Communist Dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, in: Cold Revolution: Central and Eastern European Societies in the Time of Socialist Realism 1948–1959, Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2020, pp. 114–120.
- Creating Silesian Identity: A Comparative Review of Three Regional Museums, in: Cultures of History Forum (21 June 2018), DOI: 10.25626/0085.
- Dějiny podle plánu. Politika dějin a paměti v normalizačním muzejnictví (History as Planned: History and Memory in Museum Management in the Normalization Period), in: Česká paměť. Místa paměti a obraz národa, Hédlová, Luba – Šustrová, Radka (eds.), Prague: Academia, 2014, pp. 279–328.