Unseen. Stories of Warsaw Servants

Unseen. Stories of Warsaw Servants is a temporary exhibition project for Museum of Warsaw, Poland.

In the early 20th c., each year there were 40,000 young female domestic workers in Warsaw. They attended to household chores, cleaning houses and apartments, cooking meals and doing the laundry. Their work touched upon the most intimate aspects of lives of many generations of Varsovians. These women-domestics occupied backstage positions in the theatre of everyday life, and until recently have also remained on the margins of interest for historians, who, if they bothered to notice their presence, they have at best described them as a community included in statistics complementing the principal statistics.

Arranged in six rooms, more than 400 historical objects and contemporary works of art tell the story of the lives of the women-servants and the history of domestic work. The layout of the exhibition reflects the journey a domestic worker made from the moment she arrived in Warsaw, searched for a job, received it, and performed her daily chores.