The author presents changes which took place in the 3 eld of ideas of presenting art to the city audience at the end of the twentieth century. She draws attention to the importance of a movement of so-called “new museology”, which revised the museum practitioners’ attitudes towards art viewers. She presents taken from Poland and Europe practices of realizing artistic practices outside exhibition halls, directly in the public space, with immediate access to the viewer, who also is invited to participate in a process of creation of the art work together with the artist. She indicates a consequence of this practice, which is a formation of a so-called “new audience” – conscious of their expectations towards cultural institutions. In the end, the author mentions a research project on the phenomenon of the “new audience” initiated in the framework of the international project “Artecitya”.

The article analyzes museum representations of communism in Poland from the perspective of exhibition strategies influencing the public understanding of the past. Over the past forty years, Western museums have increasingly moved away from the affirmative model of presenting the past, dominating since the nineteenth century, towards critical paradigms and even those pro-moting social activism. The analysis of Polish exhibitions devoted to recent history carried out from this perspective allows us to reveal the functions fulfilled by museum institutions in the Polish social and political reality.

We talk with Prof. Andrzej Jajszczyk about his encounter with the historic ethnic group of Slovincians, his friendship with film director Andrzej Wajda, and his fascination with Japanese culture.