VOICES exhibition opens multimedia space of the Museum of Civilian Voices by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation's in Kyiv 

The Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv has launched the VOICES exhibition, which opened the multimedia space of the Museum of Civilian Voices by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation with an art installation by GOGOLFEST. The exhibition will be open to visitors from 23 February to 26 April 2024 at the Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv at 7, Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street. 

Andrii Palatnyi, who is the theater curator of GOGOLFEST, spoke about the idea and design, purpose and creative implementation of the exhibition: 

"One of the tasks we tried to implement was to find ways to comment on the events of the war, to respond to them, to engage the countries of the world in dialogue. The three installations here form a triptych dedicated to the loss of home and the question of where home is. Is home the walls? Is it loved ones? Is it us? The first installation is City. A ruined city. A city of memory. A city of empty houses. The second one consists of suitcases - the Pillar of Destroyed Life, among which there are artifacts of the Museum of Civilian Voices. The third is the Refugees wall, where each figure hides an emotion, a story of a person who left. There is also a video installation with an open ending. This is a question of how to live during the war." 

At the opening of the exhibition, Natalia Yemchenko, a member of the Supervisory Board of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, spoke about the importance of the Museum of Civilian Voices for shaping the culture of memory about the war in Ukraine and the evolution of the project: 

"Today is a very important event for us: The Museum of Civilian Voices has gone offline for the first time. We believe that the idea will be successful. The museum is the largest project in terms of preserving data about the war. Since 2014, we have accumulated more than 100,000 live stories. There are many initiatives in Ukraine that also record the events of the war. Our big idea is to create a platform where these initiatives can talk, look for common answers, and combine huge amounts of data into systems." 

Diana Popova, director of the Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv, spoke about the importance of partnerships between museums and the value of prompt documentation of events: 

"For us, this partnership is about sharing expertise. It is very important to record information immediately, in hot pursuit, before the details and feelings of events are erased from the memory. Years later, history is perceived differently - and felt differently."  

Anton Drobovych, director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, spoke about the importance of the Museum's offline space for the development of a culture of memory in Ukraine: 

"It is a great joy to see the growth of cool national initiatives to create documents of the era. One of the most powerful among them is the Museum of Civilian Voices. Initiatives that systematically, in a team, according to a certain methodology, record the data of the era can become one of the main sources for researching events in the future." 

GOGOLFEST is the creative partner of the VOICES exhibition. The producer and author of the exhibition idea is its founder Vlad Troitskyi. The system partner of the exhibition is the Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv.