Agata Pietrasik


Dr Agata Pietrasik is an art historian at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In her research, she focuses on the representations and memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War in visual arts and culture of the mid-20th century in Europe.

She earned her M.A at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw (2009). In 2017, she defended her doctoral thesis at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Her first book titled “Art in a Disruptive World. Poland, 1939-1949” was published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2021.

Her research was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She was a post-doctoral researcher at the German Center for Art History in Paris, a visiting scholar at Institut national d'histoire de l'art in Paris and a Getty/ACLS post-doctoral Fellow in Art History.


Project description

How Exhibitions Rebuilt Europe: Exhibiting War Crimes and the Holocaust in the 1940’s

The project addresses the exhibitions of war crimes that were organized at the end of and immediately after the Second World War. They were a transnational phenomenon that attracted enormous audiences in cities and towns throughout both Eastern and Western Europe.

This research reveals the ways in which didactic avant-garde aesthetics such as collage and photomontage migrated into mainstream exhibition design and influenced its contemporary technological development. It also critically evaluates the way art institutions became singularly important agents in rebuilding a post-war world order, arguably instigating one of the crucial roles they retain today. Most importantly, the analysis of these exhibition practices offers a new critical perspective on representations of the Jewish experience of the War. It is addressing the central question of the mediation of that experience, while also revealing how early postwar narratives continue to shape current modes of visualizing the Holocaust specifically, and Jewish wartime experience in general.

Explore what we do

Remember the Holocaust

Fight antisemitism

Strengthen democracy

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