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Viacheslav Chornovil was a journalist, a sixtier, human rights activist and founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. He studied journalism in Kyiv, finishing his degree after some fits and starts in 1960. After working for a Lviv television station for two years, Chornovil returned to Kyiv, where he applied to do graduate work but was not admitted for political reasons. He instead went to work for Dnipro GES and then a local newspaper. In 1963, together with Alla Horska, Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Zverstiuk created the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv, taking active part in the burgeoning sixtiers movement, disseminating and publishing samizdat, and organizing a number of literary and civic gatherings. In 1965, he, Ivan Dziuba and Vasyl Stus publicly spoke out against arrests that had taken place of a number of their fellow travelers, choosing as their venue of protest the Kyiv screening of Sergei Parajanov’s internationally acclaimed film „Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” As a result, Chornovil was fired from his job and subject to myriad searches and surveillance. He also refused to testify against the brothers Horyn’, calling the judges considering their case criminals, which resulted in additional punitive measures against him.

After publishing an account of these ongoing repressions abroad, Chornovil himself was tried and sentenced to three years of hard labor in 1967. He was amnestied and released in 1969, resuming immediately his activism, first in support of Ivan Dziuba, who was being pressured to recant the arguments outlined in his work Internationalism or Russification and later in the publication of 5 editions of the journal Ukrainskyi Visnyk (Ukrainian Chronicle), one of the most important samizdat publications in Soviet Ukraine, which also included regular reports of human rights abuses and unjust arrests and detainments. He wrote letters to the Ukrainian Central Committee in defense of historian Valentyn Moroz, after his arrest in 1970 and upon his initiative Ukrainian dissidents formed a committee in defense of Nina Strokata, a microbiologist, who was arrested that year as well.

Given his activism, and his ties to the Lviv dissidents, especially to Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, it is no surprise that Chornovil was arrested again alongside them during the wave of arrests that took place January 12-14, 1972.  In response to threats against his wife and child, Chornovil went on an eight-day hunger strike. Ultimately, the courts handed out a severe sentence of 6 years of hard labor in Mordovia and 3 years of exile in Yakutia. While in exile, Chornovil actively corresponded with his compatriots, among them Iryna Kalynets-Stasiv, with whom he discussed parochial every day concerns alongside the legality of the work regimen forced upon GULag inmates. His lively, accessible and warm delivery are thought to be a unique contribution to our understanding of the Soviet penal system for political prisoners during the union’s decadent phase.

Vlasta Chramostová is one of the most significant personalities from the Czech cultural scene of the 20th century. She was born on 17 November 1926 in Brno as the oldest of five children of the engineer Vladimír Chramosta. She spent her childhood in Skryje u Rouchovan, a village which was destroyed in 1976 during the construction of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Station. She studied at the Department of Drama at the Brno Conservatory between 1941 and 1945. In 1944 she was forcibly made to work as a machinist at a German aircraft factory near Brno. During the war she acted in her first “apartment theatre” with her classmates and in the hall of “Nový domov”, a housing association in Brno. After WWII, she worked at the Svobodné divadlo (Free Theatre, now Brno City Theatre) in Brno, the Olomouc City Theatre and Brno State Theatre. She relocated to Divadlo na Vinohradech (Vinohrady Theatre) in Prague in 1950. In the same year, she married Bohumil Pavlinec, a director of Czechoslovak Radio in Brno. After her divorce, she lived with the artist Konrád Babraj, with whom she had a son. In 1963, her 4-year-old son died in a car accident and Chramostová herself was badly injured. She married the cameraman Stanislav Milota in 1971. At the beginning of Normalization she left Divadlo na Vinohradech in protest at the dismissal of its director František Pavlíček; Chramostová had been one of the ensemble’s leading actresses. She was unable to perform in film, television and radio due to political reasons. She acted for a short time in Divadlo za branou and gave guest performances at the West Bohemian Theatre in Cheb. In 1973 she was officially banned from performing in public. Thanks to her connections in the dissident movement she established “apartment theatre” in her flat near the National Museum in Prague. She organised (with some help from her husband) the first performance in October 1976 to mark the 75th birthday of Jaroslav Seifert, a banned national artist. Václav Havel, who was imprisoned few months later, was among the guests at the premiere. Vlasta Chramostová was one of the first people to sign Charter 77. That led to even more pressure from the State Security (StB) against her and her apartment theatre, which she was forbidden to organise during the 1980s. In January 1989, she attended a memorial event to commemorate Jan Palach. Vlasta Chramostová and Libuše Šilhánková were later given suspended sentences because of their letter to Jakeš and Adamec with a declaration related to the “Palach Week”. In the same year, she was awarded the Poul Lauritzen Foundation Freedom Award for her contribution towards human rights. In 1990, she was declared an honorary member of the National Theatre, where she performed after 1991. She was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk for her contribution to the development of democracy, humanity and human rights in 1998. During the 1990s, she performed in television and several films and was twice nominated for the Czech Lion Award, the most renowned Czech film award. She was awarded a Special Thalia Award for her lifelong contribution to the theatre in 2007.

Ivan Chvatík is a Czech philosopher and former pupil of Jan Patočka. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. In 1968, Chvatík became an external aspirant at the  Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, supervised by professor Jan Patočka. After Patočkaʼs expulsion from the University in 1972, he stopped official graduate study and continued organising Patočkaʼs private seminars and lectures. Immediately after Patočkaʼs death, Ivan Chvatík deposited Patočkaʼs written legacy in a secret location and began publishing his works as a samizdat. Until 1989, 27 samizdat volumes of Jan Patočkaʼs works were issued. In 1990, Ivan Chvatík and his colleagues were recognised by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences for their samizdat publication activities. Chvatík also cooperated with the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, which was founded in 1982. The Institute handled, among other things, the philosophical legacy of Jan Patočka. Thus, Ivan Chvatík constantly made copies of Patočkaʼs works and, with the help of collaborators, smuggled these reproductions into Vienna. In Vienna, these works were provided to those interested and translated into German or French. In 1984, twelve of Martin Heideggerʼs lectures, translated into Czech by Chvatík, were published in Oxford. These books were then smuggled secretly into Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, Chvatík led a private philosophical seminar on Heideggerʼs “Being and Time,” using his own translation in progress, and organised the visits of foreign philosophical guests at the seminars. In 1990, Chavtík set up the Jan Patočka Archives as a special department at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and today Ivan Chvatík still serves as the director of this archive.

Beginning in 1990, Ivan Chvatík served as a governmental liaison for the founding of the Central European University and as the secretary to the board of trustees of the Prague CEU Foundation, until the end of the CEU in Prague in 1997. Since 1993, he has been co-director of the Center for Theoretical Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1997 Ivan Chvatík received the Jan Patočka Memorial Medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences in recognition of accomplishments in furthering scientific research. Since 1990 he has edited 29 books by Jan Patočka, including 19 volumes of his collected works.

Jan Chwałczyk (1924) is a painter, sculptor, creator of the kinetic installations and mail art. He is a leading representative of the Polish neo-avant-garde. In 1962-1976 he was a member of the Wroclaw Group, and in 1972-1977 he ran the Art of Creative Information Gallery in Wroclaw. An artist interested mainly in the issues of light and colour, and the relationship between the art and science.

Chwałczyk was born in Krosno and studied in the State Higher School for Fine Arts in 1946-1951 in Wroclaw, where he acquired a painting diploma in prof. Eugeniusz Geppert’s laboratory. In the 1950s Chwałczyk created paintings in a manner close to informel, taking an inspiration from nature. In 1955 he took part in the Arsenal Exhibition of Young Fine Artists in Warsaw. From 1957 to 1963 he co-organised the Searching for Form and Colour group, and from 1962 to 1976 – Wroclaw Group. In 1963-1964 he started to practice structural painting, treating the picture as an object, not just a composition. Later he got closer to the kinetic art, starting from the First Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg in 1965, and an Artists’ and Scientists’ Symposium in Puławy one year later.

Since the second half of the 1960s Chwałczyk’s main interests are the light and colour, which was represented on his individual exhibition Portraits and Autoportraits in 1969 in the Under Mona Lisa Gallery ran by Jerzy Lidwiński. Objects created by the artist were reflecting light, falling on different surfaces, and creating various shadows and colours, depending on shape and material. The famous project of the Solar Spectrum Projector – presented by Chwałczyk during the Wroclaw 1970 Symposium – was the concept of a device streaming the solar light in different colours onto certain points of Wroclaw. The same year, during the Artists’, Scientists’ and Art Theoreticians’ Symposium in Osieki, the artist presented another project: the Colourful Configuration of the Spatial Light Transformation, which was supposed to create a portrait of the light in the audience consciousness. Chwałczyk tried to capture the physical features of the light and colour, research their properties as phenomena which enable seeing. Such approach situated him within the op-art stream and on the border of “impossible art”.

In the 1970s Chwałczyk got interested in the influence that art has on the society. He also actively participated in the international net of mail art creators by running in 1972-1977 the Art of Creative Information Gallery – a node in the net of letters’ exchange, artistic prints, and other documents. Chwałczyk initiated the international artistic actions, such as International Artist Cooperation in 1967-1969, Defending the Mental Sphere in 1972-1973, and Counterpoint in 1972-1974. In the frame of the latter one Chwałczyk gathered 68 speeches of the Polish and foreign artists, focusing on the current situation and the future development of art.

Chwałczyk participated in the most important events of the Polish conceptual art: symposiums of the Golden Bunch in Zielona Góra, Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, symposium in Puławy, outdoor panels in Osieki, as well as the Wroclaw 1970 Visual Arts Symposium, where he coordinated the execution of a project The Unlimited, Vertical Composition of Henryk Stażewski. He also took part in the Biennale in São Paulo in 1981. In 2006 he received the Prize of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and in 2011 – the Silver Medal for the Meritious for Culture Gloria Artis.

Petr Cibulka is a Czech political activist, signatory to Charter 77 and collector of Czechoslovak unofficial music groups recordings from the 1980s. Cibulka was also a member of the “VONS” (Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Prosecuted), whose aim was to monitor and to inform the public about politically motivated lawsuits and repressions against the opposition, non-conforming citizens, etc. in former Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, Cibulka was imprisoned several times for his attitudes and activities, totalling over five years. During the 1980s, Cibulka collected and distributed recordings of music groups. His private collection was probably the largest of its kind in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. His collection is now stored at the Libri Prohibiti library, an institution dedicated to the collection of samizdat cultural production. After 1989, Cibulka was also known as the publisher of lists of collaborators of the former StB (State Security), also known as the “Cibulka Lists”. Cibulka is still politically active, he is the founder of the political party “Right Block”, he regularly runs for election in governmental institutions and regional elections, and he was also a candidate for the presidential election in 2013.