Visual programme of the Art Festival Bouquet Kyiv Stage 2023
17 August - 18 September
Sophia of Kyiv, Khlibnya
What is memory at the terms of the war if not a promise to future generations?
War Fragments Museum — — 300 objects with their stories which are silent witnesses of the things which must not be silenced. The artifacts have been collected during the russian full-scale invasion and now are solidified in transparent cubes.
The idea for the project stems from the concept of postmemory authored by Marianna Girsh, an American-Romanian literature scholar and culturologist. She is known due to her studies on visual and literature images of memory, trauma and identity in the context of holocaust. Postmemory is a term for defining cross generational sharing of traumatic experience. It is a notion of the kind of collective ideas about the past which is formed by next generations after catastrophic experience on the “breakout” of collective memory. It is preservation and continuance of memory, its examination that is paramount for the future of the world. We will never forget what we had to go through; whether it is fight on the battle field, or survival under missile strikes or support of Ukraine from hundreds of kilometers away. Memory tied to the object becomes part of eternity: material, still, significant, time crystal. It is not going to vanish with the time go by.
To collect the artifacts for the museum, the team undertook expeditions to different parts of Ukraine: de-occupied territories as well as the ones in a close proximity to the front-line. The mission was to record the stories of ordinary civilians, military people, volunteers- the stories which can hardly end up in the news and which, unfortunately, far surpass those presented in the museum.  All funds raised from cubes sales will be directed to rehabilitation of children and military people and financial aid for their families. Purchases are available only on the museum website.