CURATORSHIP PRAXISES TOWARDS ‘DISPLACED ASSETS’ IN POST-1989 MUSEUM PROJECTS: TWO EXHIBITIONS AT WARSAW’S XAWERY DUNIKOWSKI MUSEUM

Abstract

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.