The creative interventions in the collection of the Ethnographic Museum by six artists from Poland, Portugal and the Netherlands are objects sensitive to cultural meanings and differences, locality and human individuality in the context of origin. Intuitively, but also relying on the research of ethnologists and ethnographers, they approach the phenomenon of color and its names, such as gamboge, flea pink, amaranth, cochineal carmine, hematite, alizarin, verdigris, absinthe, celadon, russet, taupe, kajal, gemstone, orpiment. 6 faces are different views of chromophilia in the context of different and distant cultural traditions.

The Ethnographic Museum in Cracow was created out of passion and respect for cultures. For peasant culture. For European cultures. For exotic cultures. This is a striking feature of this oldest and largest ethnographic collection in Poland. It was established in 1911 through the efforts of Seweryn Udziela – a teacher, amateur ethnographer and collector of the products of folk culture. He wished to “save from extinction the relics of the past disappearing irretrievably”. He saw the ethnographic museum as a workshop of learning, where “one sits down to work and does study on the history and present state of peoples’ culture” (1904). Today, more than a century after its founding, the museum is developing this idea: documenting and interpreting what is disappearing and conducting research on the present.

https://etnomuzeum.eu