Robert Kostro

Over the past twenty years many new museums and memory institutions have been developed in Poland. The first significant initiative was the Warsaw Rising Museum opened in 2004. Several new museums have gained in national importance, including the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN) in Warsaw, the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, and the Polish History Museum in Warsaw. While many of those projects have become the subject of public debate, a couple dozen lesser initiatives have also been launched by local or regional authorities. Robert Kostro’s project aims to elucidate the social and political circumstances that have led to the museum boom in Poland as well as to present these as various responses to important questions and challenges emerging both from internal Polish discussions as well as from international memory debates.

Robert Kostro is working on the concept for an exhibition that explores the different methods, media, and ideas used to construct the history of the Polish state and nation from the medieval period to the present day. It starts with the chronicle by Gallus Anonymous, which recounts the history of the state from the point of view of the Piast dynasty in the beginning of the twelfth century. For the early modern period, the focus is on texts and iconography from the perspective of the gentry, the ruling class of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we see the creation of the popular canon of Polish history by artists: painters, poets, and novelists. As history was incorporated into these media, it played a key role in constructing a modern national identity. The twentieth century is the age of new visual media, specifically film and television. Finally, an important change in our times is the democratization of history: history books, visual media, and museums are increasingly interested in presenting the point of view and historical experience of ordinary people.