ANA Women`s Life in the 20th Century

ANNA

Women`s Life in the 20^th Century

Through this exhibition we do not seek for answers, rather for similar questions! Questions that all of us must confront at the turning points of life. Questions that preface our decisions: which way should I go, which is my way, what will happen to me? Then questions that follow our decisions in life: what was the way I have chosen, why have I followed this road, where have I got? Why am I what I am, how has this all happen to me?

Our exhibition does not offer questions, but suggests us to formulate certain questions. Maybe from the ethnographic point of view it is an unusual perspective. While we – representatives of our discipline, researchers of folk culture – are expected to deliver concise answers, real facts and data, connections, analyses, we face ourselves the questions that preface our decisions. Decisions regarding what we will say about certain things, how we will deal with certain phenomena, which lead us through further questions and further decisions on the never ending path of knowledge. Thus this time we took the courage to play a little bit with everything we know, or we think we know on human fate, based on our professional and personal experiences.

We had the chance, we could have chosen a real person to present her life course as real as it could get. But we decided to do something else, something different, something we usually do not do. We created a fictive person, we created Anna, who had never existed. Our desire was to create her in such a manner, that at the end, You, the Visitor, should say: although Anna had never existed, she might have been very well a real person. As on the two possible paths of her life course, imagined by us, appear numerous aspects, that we all know, we all have experienced. Let`s say that we collected some bits of many real lives, but we did not make a generalization. Our aim was none of that…