Wystawianie przeszłości, czyli historia w nowych muzeach
Exhibiting the past or history in new museums

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to respond to the issue of what are the reasons for the changes in the institution of a historical museum in the context of modern cultural transformation. It reveals new perspectives, which are being opened for exhibition creators, and challenges resulting from new interpretation strategies. Museums (and histories created in them) are one of the ways, in which a human being refers to issues and ideas which concern himself and his past. Exhibitions not so much explain the past realities as they rather describe them in the context of their contemporary social and political conditions. The present interest in historical museums (both in Poland and in the world), reflected in numerous publications,conferences and research projects is an effect of museums trying to adapt to new situations and cope with conditions unlike those which accompanied their creation as public institutions. As institutional symbolic tokens of cities and regions, museums have new tasks to improve their image and to attract tourists; they become symbols of cultural revitalisation and representatives of the so called “soft” economy and new urbanisation. It has an impact on exhibition strategies and profiles in which new tendencies towards entertainment, performance and show are highlighted. It seems that we are now witnesses to the emergence of a new generation of historical museums (dubbed “new museums”) which aregoverned by different rules of representing the past and communicating with the audience than before.

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