Anna Wowk Vestergaard at Estonian Museum Festival
Anna Wowk Vestergaard speaks at Estonian Museum Festival conference
The Estonian Museum Association has just celebrated it’s 30th anniversary with an annual Museum Festival in the Estonian border town Narva. The festival took place on the 24th and 25th of September, and this year’s theme was “Museums and a Recent History”.
As part of the festival, a conference was held to discuss how to collect, exhibit and preserve modern materials and how to mediate sensitive topics to museum visitors.
One of the key speakers was Anna Wowk Vestergaard, Museum Inspector at Den Gamle By Open Air Museum (Aarhus, Denmark). She introduced the museum’s newest exhibition, “Modern town”, and gave an inspiring presentation on the methods for exhibiting recent history at grass root level and through the eyes of individuals and their environments.
The museum conference involved an expansive program touching on recent history and the themes of everyday life. In addition to Vestergaard’s lecture, there was presentations on the issues of creating museum exhibitions on the world wars and political events from recent history. Rafał Wnuk, former curator of the Gdansk II World War Museum, spoke about a discussion that arose in society as the museum was making a new exhibition.
Anna Wowk Vestergaard has been invited to come to Narva with the support of the Danish Cultural Institute in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.