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Accompanying Programme to the Exhibition

01.03.2024. - 15.09.2024.

The accompanying programme to the ‘Life after Death. Remembrance Practices and the Museum’ exhibition includes guided tours with the creative team and conversations with experts in various fields on the function of memory, remembering and forgetting, observance and commemoration, from the European pre-modern cultures to critical museology and contemporary cognitive sciences. We have also developed educational and creative activities aimed at school students and families with children.  

 

Exhibition tours guided by the creative team

September
11.09. at 18:00 curators Kristīne Liniņa and Kaspars Vanags 
13.09. at 18.00 curators Kristīne Liniņa and Kaspars Vanags 

April 
11.04. at 17:30 curator Kaspars Vanags 
25.04. at 17:30 curators Kristīne Liniņa and Kaspars Vanags 

May
11.05 at 15.00 curator Kaspars Vanags, in English

June
8.06. at 15.00 curator Kaspars Vanags, in English

 

Conversations at the museum 

‘Looking in the Eye: A Century of Vision Care’, with optometrist Miks Puķītis 
19.04.2024 at 17:30 

Vision is one of the human senses that help perceive and comprehend the world. As we recall what we have seen, our memories are formed. According to the data of the World Health Organization, nearly one in every four people in the world today suffers from an eyesight problem of some kind and requires daily special care for their eye health. What are the options provided by various areas of vision care, including, first and foremost, primary diagnostics and optometry? What are the basic principles of the diagnostic equipment, geometry of vision correction and production of eyeglasses for vision correction? What is the role they have played in the vision care methods over the last century? The connections between centuries-old and current developments in the world of the bespectacled will be revealed in a talk by optometrist Miks Puķītis. 

Miks Puķītis started his professional education as a student in the Bachelor Programme in Natural Sciences at the University of Latvia and then went on to pursue theoretical and practical studies of optometry in professional programmes both in Latvia and at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in Spain and the US military healthcare programme. Puķītis is currently a practicing optometrist in his family business with branches in Kurzeme and Vidzeme. 

‘The Human Body and Commemoration of the Dead in European Pre-Modern Cultures’, with historian Gustavs Strenga 
08.05.2024 at 18:00 

Life and death are corporeal experiences. Similarly, commemoration of the dead, which is an essential part of every culture, is also a corporeal experience, both literally and figuratively. Objects owned by the departed person and their actual body – or what has remained of it – become carriers of memories of the deceased. Sacred significance may be conferred upon remains; they may be venerated and preserve memory of someone. Conversely, remains can lose their sacred meaning and memory of the deceased person can fade away. The talk will be dedicated to the varied practices of remembering the dead in the pre-modern age Europe (500–1700). 

The range of academic interests of the historian Gustavs Strenga includes research of medieval memory and remembrance, gifting as a historical practice and the life of medieval heroes after the Middle Ages. Strenga’s monograph ‘Remembering the Dead: Collective Memory and Commemoration in Late Medieval Livonia’ was published in 2023. 

Curating the Museum Holdings through Removal or Transfer  
09.05.2024 

Shaping the holdings of any museum is always closely linked with the idea and objectives of the particular institution, which, in the contemporary museological practice, are reflected in the descriptions of its mission and vision – statements that may undergo change over time. Therefore, various ways of building up the holdings and the opposite approach of removing items from the collection or transferring them to other museums with a more appropriate thematic profile, thus increasing the potential utility of the objects, are both equally legitimate and welcome. 

Museum professionals involved in curating museum holdings are welcome to join the conversation taking place in a collegial environment among a community of fellow museum specialists and share their experience of steps taken in evaluation of their respective museum’s collection (approaches, methods) and actual cases of removing or transferring items. 

‘Memory as Caring: Formation of Personality and Kinship through Material Practices’, with museum researcher and anthropologist Anna Žabicka 
15.05.2024 at 18:00 

A Soviet-era amber broach; a shoddy jack knife; Czech crystal glasses; a coffee cup with some small cracks; an icon; a hand-written recipe for honey cake: these and so many completely mundane objects hold the potential to become a significant element of material memory practices.  

What is the significance of the objects we inherit or choose to hold on to after the death of our family members or even strangers? Why do we pickle our gherkins and bake our apple cakes following the recipes of our grandmothers? Why do people approaching the end of their life give us as gifts some very specific objects? And what should we make of celebrating Easter in the cemetery and leaving food items on graves? Based on recognisable examples, the talk will be dedicated to the role of objects and material practices in the formation of memories, relationships, personality and caring. 

Anna Žabicka is a museum researcher and social anthropologist specialising in the anthropology of medicine, health, aging, death, caring and kinship. As part of her PhD thesis, she is researching aging and care in the Latvian countryside. Alongside her research work at Pauls Stradiņš Museum of the History of Medicine, Žabicka lectures for MA students in anthropology at Riga Stradiņš University, conducts lectures in bioethics for medical students at the University of Latvia and works on academic studies in anthropology and bioethics. 

"Psychology and Neuroscience of Memory Function" with neuroscience expert Agnese Ušacka 
29.05.2024 at 18:00 

Memory is one of the most fundamental abilities of the human mind. Without it, daily functioning would be unthinkable. The human brain performs a complex task every moment, consuming large energy resources so that we can memorize, remember and also forget. Moreover, these processes are unconscious to us and therefore beyond our reach. However, there are techniques that can allow us to memorize the information we need more successfully and ensure that it is stored longer in our memory stores. Therefore, based on knowledge of the psychology and neuroscience of memory functioning, in my lecture I will tell you - what is memory from the point of view of cognitive and brain activity? What factors can influence brain activity in a way that makes it easier to memorize? Why does the brain forget information? I will also tell you about the brain's tendency to create false memories. Memory is flexible rather than static, so we can't always trust our own memories.

 

Admission 

Admission to the events with an entrance ticket to the museum: adults – EUR 5.00; students and seniors – EUR 3.00; school students – EUR 2.00. 

 

Guide for families with children 

If you are visiting the museum with children between 6 and 12, you are welcome to use the guide ‘Memory Detective’. It will help you locate places and objects that carry memories and discuss the issues highlighted in the exhibition together as a family. The guide in Latvian is available free of charge at the museum’s Info Centre.

  

Workshop for families with children 

26.05.2024 at 11:00 

More details to come.

 

Event for school students 

Exhibition ‘Life after Death. Remembrance Practices and the Museum’ reveals the formative process of the Museum of the History of Medicine in the 20th-century cultural historical and political context. During the event, school students view the exhibition accompanied by a museum educator and complete exercises aimed at fostering critical thinking and involving them in decision-making, creating together a Top 10 list of museum objects. The event, part of the ‘Latvian School Bag’ programme of cultural education, is aimed at school students between 12 and 19. 

More on the exhibition and application here  

 

Exhibition ‘Life after Death. Remembrance Practices and the Museum’ 

Not every day goes down in history and not all fame is forever. As we browse and re-examine the historical evidence stored away in the museum’s depository and see the artefacts starting to fade and disintegrate just like memories, the process has given rise to an exhibition entitled ‘Life after Death. Remembrance Practices and the Museum’. The subject we have chosen deals with generational change in Latvian museums. It is based on an assumption that history museums founded during the Soviet occupation suffer from post-traumatic disorders of memory function or perhaps were created to serve another purpose altogether – remembrance as an ideologized form of honouring. 

During the process of mounting the exhibition, curators Kaspars Vanags and Kristīne Liniņa have tried to unravel a tangle of half-truths regarding the origins of the museum’s collection, focusing on the fate of private collections destroyed during the postwar years. Borrowing the approach of depth psychology, the exhibition provides an insight into the basement of the museum, still featuring fragments of the 1950s permanent display, as well as an opportunity to find out if ‘everything is alright up there’ for the museum or perhaps there are ‘bats in the attic’: based on old minutes of meetings and advisory sittings discovered there, a film on the creation of the museum was made by Toms Harjo and Zane Zajančkauska. 

Through reconstruction of past memories erased by the post-traumatic stress disorder, the museum speaks not just of itself but rather of the healing of the society as a whole, urging to replace afterlife with regeneration. 

More on the exhibition