Two exhibitions at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum
of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace, branch of the National
Museum in Warsaw: the ‘Inventorying’ Display-Research
Project, which was a kind of a public inventory of the sculpture collection (2012) and the Exhibition ‘The Estate. Sculptures from
the collection of the Von Rose family and films and photographs
from the archive of Zofia Chomętowska’ (2015) are case studies
serving the Author to analyse curatorship practices with respect
to the collections whose major part is composed of ‘displaced
assets’, first of all from the so-called ‘Regained Territories’.
In the words of the Chief Curator at the Królikarnia Museum
since 2011 and the Exhibitions’ Curator Agnieszka Tarasiuk: it is
a troublesome collection testifying to a difficult heritage and not
yielding to conservation.
The paper’s methodological basis is the museum exhibits’
provenance research conducted by R. Olkowski, L.M.
Kamińska, and M. Romanowska-Zadrożna, while its context
is found in the programme assumptions of the Strategy for
the Operations and Development of the National Museum
in Warsaw 2010–2020 worked out by the former National
Museum’s Director Piotr Piotrowski. One of its priorities
is to clarify the origins of the collections of unknown provenance,
and settling accounts with their former owners.
Furthermore, the question related to constructing museum’s
genealogy and the memory of history of the period immediately
following WWII in the new socio-political situation
in Poland after 1989 is posed. The position for dealing with
collections’ provenance research introduced by P. Piotrowski
was liquidated following the Director’s dismissal in 2012.
The paper forms part of a bigger whole.
CURATORSHIP PRAXISES TOWARDS ‘DISPLACED
ASSETS’ IN POST-1989 MUSEUM PROJECTS:
TWO EXHIBITIONS AT WARSAW’S XAWERY
DUNIKOWSKI MUSEUM
