Liberal Arts. How to Read This Exhibition?
The exhibition presents the research conducted at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” not through a list of projects, research units or a list of authors, but through the issues, questions, ways of thinking, and methodologies addressed by the Faculty. The exception are the names of the persons managing ERC (European Research Council) grants. The main perspective adopted organises the narrative of the exhibition and guides the viewer through fields of reflection in which the relationships between different areas of knowledge are of significant importance. Here, different analytical approaches coexist, combining the tools of the humanities, social sciences and, in selected areas, natural sciences, creating a space for joint reflection and discussion.
The exhibition is organised around four thematic areas, which are not fields or disciplines, but different ways of looking at common problems. Each of them shows how humanities and social science research transcends their own boundaries, the boundaries between the past and the present, text and experience, academic knowledge and social reality.
1 The Mediterranean World: Traditions, Receptions, and The Circulation of Ideas
The opening section of the exhibition presents Mediterranean culture as a shared frame of reference in which ideas, narratives, and conceptual tropes circulated across diverse geographical and social regions, languages, and political systems. We trace, on the one hand, the longue durée of Greco-Roman motifs and their successive reinterpretations from antiquity to the present day; and on the other, the formation of intercultural modes of thought within a broad historical perspective.
2 At The Frontiers of The Humanities
In this section, attention shifts toward the frontiers—spaces where languages, religions, and political orders intersect. These are also places where different media and forms of expression meet: text, image, sound, and performance. The analysis focuses on the mechanisms of exchange, conflict, and the negotiation of meaning that shape identities, memory, and power relations. Here, the frontier is not treated as a periphery, but rather as a site of creative tension and change.
3 Digital Humanities
Here, the exhibition shows how digital tools are changing the way we work with sources and ask research questions. From critical editions to large-scale datasets, digital humanities combine philological precision with new forms of analysis, raising questions about interpretation, automation, and researcher responsibility.
4 Society and Language
Finally, the exhibition presents research focusing on social processes in which self-awareness, Hierarchy, and community are formed. Analyses of the mechanisms of truth-making, migration and multilingualism show how communication practices affect social life and whose experiences gain visibility and recognition.
Create Your Own Artes Liberales
Most of the boards are decorated with personifications of sciences from 17th-century graphics by Theodor Meyer. Thanks to their attributes, you can recognise grammar, rhetoric and dialectics, as well as arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. What you see on the table are colourful elements – puzzling figures that together form the Faculty’s logo. However, several new ones have been added. The exhibition is an invitation to visitors. It is worth following your own path among the sciences to transcend their boundaries.
FROM THE TOP, 1, 2 Interior of the Faculty building at Nowy Świat 69 (photo: M. Kaźmierczak) 3, 4 Interior of the Faculty building at Nowy Świat 69 (photo: M. Kaźmierczak)