Children curate Warsaw museum exhibition

Children worked with museum experts to find out about the artefacts

A new exhibition curated by children is opening at the National Museum in Poland's capital, Warsaw.

It took six months to prepare and covers a variety of periods and subjects ranging from ancient artefacts to contemporary sculpture, the museum says on its website. Sixty-nine children between the ages of six and 14 were given access to the building's storerooms, and some of the 300 items that they selected for display have never been shown to the general public before. The youngsters "found and liberated" the pieces, the museum says.

Called "Anything Goes", it's getting top billing at the National Museum as the main temporary exhibition between now and May. "Children want a museum visit to be an adventure, they want to create impressions, and to engage," museum director Agnieszka Morawinska tells Niezalezna.pl website. "They don't just want to tell a story, they want to stir emotions and infect people with their feelings."

As well as digging around behind the scenes, the youngsters have prepared multimedia presentations, chosen the exhibition's layout and design, written information leaflets and recorded audio guides. Among the attractions visitors will find is an exhibit exploring historical and everyday heroes, and one called The Ghost Room where "the objective of the junior curators was to scare the visitors", the museum says.

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