Agata Stasińska
The article describes the process of planning and creating the exhibition Entangled: Historical Non-European Ethnographic Collection of the University of Wrocław. It tells the story of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum in Breslau (now Wrocław) and its collections. The main assumption of the curators, Urszula Bończuk-Dawidziuk and Agata Stasińska, were to change the narratives used so far, broaden the perspective in research on non-European artifacts, and focus on materials that, despite addressing a difficult topic, do not promote harmful stereotypes. A critical analysis of the figure of a collector, leading to a break with his primacy, was also extremely important. The core of the exhibition consists of artifacts from the Museum of the University of Wrocław and the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. Most of them originate from pre-war Wrocław. Each one has been described as created by an artist who is now unknown, which has allowed their significance to be emphasized and their memory to be restored. The exhibition is divided into five parts. The first tells the story of colonialism, focusing in particular on the German Empire. The following one concern the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in former Wrocław and the ways in which the objects were acquired for this type of institution. The exhibition also addresses the issue of the subjectivity of collections, which is always influenced by their owners. The last part of the display is devoted to looking into the future, which undoubtedly brings changes and opens us up to the need for discussion.