POLIN Museum was built on the rubble of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw. Its core exhibition was created from scratch – without a historic building and without a collection, although objects were purchased and borrowed for the exhibition.

The starting point was the story, not a collection, and our top priority was bringing that story to life. Even if we could have drawn from every collection in the world, objects alone could not tell this thousand-year story. Paradoxically, intangible heritage has turned out to be the key to materializing history.

In her lecture Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will discuss materializing the intangible - the words and thoughts of those who created the texts from which the quotations in the POLIN Museum’s core exhibition come.

The lecture will be followed by a screening of “The Return”, a documentary film by Adam Zucker depicting life of young Jews in contemporary Poland.

The event inaugurates the conference “Images of Cultural Diversity and Heritage” and the 35th anthropological and documentary film festival NAFA 2015 organized within the “Promotion of Diversity in Culture and Arts” framework.

>>The catalogue of the conferene can be downloaded here<<

For more details please see: nafa2015.pl

21 September, 5.30 PM, free admission, lecture in English (simultaneous translation into Polish)