Discover everything about art & design from Klara Emilia

I will always be impressed by the adaptability of humans. During the 1950s in the Soviet Union, listening to music from the West, especially from the US, was prohibited.

A group of people therefore started to illegally creates copies of records on X-Rays and then sold on the black market. This is how Jazz, Disco, and Rock 'n Roll found their way to music enthusiasts.

Watch this mini-documentary for more info.

It's the last few days to go visit this marvelous exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam that is there until June 4th. The visual artist Saodat Ismailova takes us with her to her native Uzbekistan and explores questions of traditions, myths, dreams, and collective memory in Central Asia.

One aspect that Ismailova explored and that I found especially fascinating was the question of language and accessibility. The Uzbek language changed alphabets throughout its modern history. It was written in an Arabic script up until the late 1920s, when it was changed to a Latin script. In the 1940s the Cyrillic script became the official one as part of a language reform in the Soviet Union. Today, Uzbek is mostly written in the Latin script again. However, the switch from Cyrillic to Latin is not yet fully finalised, as Uzbekistan announced that the country aims for a full transition to the Latin-based alphabet in 2023.

According to Ismailova, these alphabet changes made it very difficult to access sources from previous generations and to create a written cultural canon. This made myths, tales and traditions that are past on orally from generation to generation such a central aspect for Uzbeks.

This is the perfect book for architecture lovers and especially those who are into brutalism.

The photographer Christopher Herwig travels through former Soviet Republics and unvails the fascinating diversity of bus stops across more than 50,000 kilometers.

This book is "uncovering the stories of the designers who built fascinating architectural marvels during the Soviet regime, Soviet Bus Stops is an ode to the power of individual creativity that would not be suppressed."