Many museums in Ukraine are now changing and expanding their exhibitions in response to Russian aggression to counter Russian and Soviet narratives.
Anastasia Bondar, Deputy Minister of Culture and Strategic Communications, said this in a commentary to an Ukrinform correspondent at a Warsaw conference on decolonizing museum practices and defining the role of museums in the restoration of Ukraine.
“We realize that we are now facing a huge challenge to change the narratives that have been imposed on museums for years over the previous 70 or 100 years,” Bondar emphasized.
According to her, given Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, many Ukrainian museums will now expand their expositions “to correctly interpret everything that is happening in the country.”
“Decolonization is also a very important element, given how museums in Ukraine originally emerged, how the communist authorities created these museums to interpret Soviet narratives. We must now change this to show our Ukrainian identity and history,” the deputy minister emphasized.
Bondar pointed out that today in Ukraine there are 12 million collections that belong to the state part of the museum fund and are distributed among museums. Less than 2 million collections are located in the temporarily occupied territories, and about half a million more items and many museum institutions have been relocated to the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.
The deputy minister thanked Polish and German partners who help Ukrainian museums preserve Ukrainian cultural values during Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine.
The Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications told Ukrinform that as of October 29 this year, 120 museums in Ukraine have suffered from Russian aggression. Of these, 15 have been completely destroyed, while 105 have sustained damage. To date, museum objects have been evacuated from 54 cultural institutions. The evacuation process is ongoing. A total of 90 museums remain in the temporarily occupied territories, including 31 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The total number of items that have been evacuated exceeds 500,000.
As reported, a two-day conference titled “Filling Blind Spots 2.0: New Narratives and the Role of Museums in the Reconstruction of Ukraine” is taking place in Warsaw, with the participation of partner institutions from Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. The international event discusses, among other things, the challenges for museums in the twenty-first century in the context of changing societal needs, as well as the decolonization of museums in Ukraine. The participants are also discussing the identification and correction of false narratives affecting museums in Ukraine and the introduction of an electronic system for registering collections in Ukrainian museums.
The conference is organized by the Polish OBMIN Foundation, which has been supporting and helping Ukrainian museums preserve cultural heritage since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
This is the third conference organized by the OBMIN Foundation together with its partners for more than 140 Ukrainian national, regional and local museums of various fields, including art, culture, national history, technology or poetry.
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