A public interview with Lesia Hasydzhak, Head of the Holodomor Museum, as part of the VOICES Exhibition of The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation.
The Museum of History of Kyiv hosted the VOICES Exhibition, a multidimensional exhibition based on true stories of Ukrainians about the war collected by The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. The Museum collects and stores the world's largest collection of first-hand accounts of the war in Ukraine - more than 110,000 stories.
As part of the exhibition, a public interview was held with Lesia Hasydzhak, PhD in History, Acting Director General of the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide, museologist. Watch the video version of the interview here.
Lesia Hasydzhak started working at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in 2015 as Deputy Director General. She was Deputy Director General from 2016 to 2017 and has been Acting Director General since July 2022. From 2019 to 2021, she was the Director of the International Charitable Foundation of the Holodomor Museum. She is a member of ICOM and a former member and Deputy Head of the Museum Council at the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy.
In 2007-2015, Lesia Hasydzhak worked at the NGO Ukrainian Centre for Museum Development as an editor of the Museum Space web portal, coordinator of the information and analytical direction, the All-Ukrainian rating campaign Museum Event of the Year and the Support Programme for Museum Workers; she was the initiator and curator of a specialised stand of museum publications at the Book Arsenal.
The public interviews, part of the VOICES Exhibition, opened a series of cultural events organised by The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation to preserve the memory of the war.
The conversations are moderated by Anastasiia Platonova, a cultural critic, cultural analyst and curator of this series of events.
Anastasiia Platonova: Today, we are talking about memory museums. These are very special museums, certain types of museums within the museum community. We will also talk about the development of the sphere of remembrance and memorialisation during the full-scale war and the process of institutional reboots in Ukrainian museums at this time.
Lesia Hasydzhak: Let me start with the fact that memory museums are new to Ukraine, to the history of Ukrainian museums, museology, etc. For us, the organisational form, the type of memorial museum, is more familiar, and this is completely different. For a long time, in Soviet museology, Ukrainian Soviet museology, and then post-Soviet museology, memorial museums were museums dedicated to certain personalities. They were seen as a department, a type of historical or local history museums. And what distinguished them? These were things, objects that belonged to certain personalities, a house or space, an apartment, connected to something.
There was no such thing as what we call a museum of memory in Ukraine today, dedicated to a complex, difficult, key event. It's not easy for all of us because everyone starts their journey on feelings and adopting foreign experiences. The most difficult thing is the collection. This is what makes a museum a museum: a collection that is researched, exhibited, preserved, and interpreted.
We approached the museumification of all these topics very late when the material culture of memory was mostly lost. The few things that have remained in families are now in museums. Oral history has also largely disappeared. We had to work with the last witnesses, victims, and survivors.
Anastasiia Platonova: How has this work been updated and changed? And the role of the museum itself in memory during a full-scale war.
Lesia Hasydzhak: From the experience of our Holodomor Museum, and from the experience of other museums, the war has actualised the missions, tasks, and values of each of these museums. That is, each of them does not speak only about the history that took place 90 or 80 years ago. All of this has very clear parallels, has common roots with the causes of the current war.
The war has shown that our work is needed and relevant today more than ever because there was a time when it seemed that everything had already been explored, no one was interested in it anymore, people wanted to live in the future, talk about space exploration, and they were only interested in museums of super science or achievements. So, in fact, this war has actualised and shown us once again how important it is to continue doing what each of us is doing. And it is valuable.
Anastasiia Platonova: I would like to go one layer deeper and talk about how these special memory museums work during the full-scale war on exhibitions. How do these museums influence the creation of memory policies right now?
Lesia Hasydzhak: Memory museums are actors in the politics of memory. At least, this is very clearly visible and traceable in Kyiv, in Lviv.
Anastasia Platonova: We can talk in layers, at different levels of depth, about how the relationship with audiences has changed. Many Ukrainian museum workers say that as soon as everything became possible, people in different cities went to museums and that museum workers saw an influx of audiences that they hadn't seen for a long time.
Lesia Hasydzhak: Yes, but they came to museums where the main exhibitions were dismantled. No one took us, Ukrainian museum workers, by surprise because we had two years of COVID before that, and we had mastered the remote format of work long ago and found it useful. Museums went for temporary exhibitions for projects that do not contain museum objects but generate feedback from the visitor. There is a lot of dialogue, almost every tour ends with a conversation and memories.
Our museum collection grew by 25% during the two years of war. People realised that what is important and valuable should not be kept at home but should be brought to the museum. Again, the history of the Holodomor is such that artefacts are mostly personal items of clothing, jewellery, or something else that has its own history related to the Holodomor. For example, we have a small sample of a coral necklace as the only thing left of a woman's wedding dowry because everything was exchanged for food.
Anastasiia Platonova: How has the current full-scale war changed the way we talk about both tragedies that are distant from us in time and what is happening now?
Lesia Hasydzhak: My first observation is that this language has become the language of art. Most of the projects about the war that are related to reflection, the experience of war, displacement, and the loss of loved ones are all art projects, not classic museological or documentary projects. Secondly, I would not say that we have a classic museum project related to the war in Ukraine.
Everyone is engaged in accumulating and forming part of the collection, but the time has not yet come to transform this into an exhibition language, and this is normal. First, we must win this war, comprehend, understand, research, mourn, and then build a museum. Actually, that's why there are art projects. They are emotional, but not as deep as what will happen later.
Anastasiia Platonova: In your opinion, what is the time for now, both on the tactical and strategic horizon? And how do approaches to memorialisation change in general just during the war?
Lesia Hasydzhak: As for the modern war, now is the time of maximum accumulation of artefacts, testimonies, and other data, that is, the formation of the largest possible base for future research. As for what is already the Museum Fund of Ukraine, now that the expositions have been dismantled and museum workers have more time, we should use this stage as efficiently as possible for digitalisation, electronic records, database creation, etc.
Anastasiia Platonova: Why is it important to remember? For a country, for a nation that has been deprived of its historical, cultural, and social memory many times, why is it so important to preserve the continuity of knowledge about itself and pass it on to the world and to future generations? Why is correct knowledge of the past so critical to the future?
Lesia Hasydzhak: This is what makes us who we are - Ukrainians. This is the basis of identity. And then everything else comes after that. Well, or simultaneously, in parallel: language, material and spiritual culture, and so on. But memory is what unites us, and therefore, it is the foundation.
Anastasiia Platonova: How do you see the trend towards rethinking and reinventing Ukrainian museums? How has this process been happening for over two years at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide?
Lesia Hasydzhak: Last year, I changed the structure of the department, and the Department of Oral History of the Holodomor appeared. This is a collection of testimonies, memories, and eyewitnesses of the Holodomor: about five thousand testimonies from different periods from all regions of Ukraine. The war made me realise that there should be a separate department within the museum that would deal with this professionally because we have to record every last witness who survived the Holodomor.
Then, I created a Department for the study of genocide, mass crimes and crimes against humanity. I wanted to go beyond just the Holodomor and genocide because I understood that the war and the crimes that are being committed have 100% signs of genocide. And war crimes. Who better than us should begin to approach this topic at the expert level?
And another huge area of work is the work on the exposition of the second stage of the museum. The museum, that is, our team, is responsible for the content and narrative. After all, in 2009, the first stage was built, which is the current Hall of Memory and some of the memorial monuments around it - the Candle, the monument to children who died during the Holodomor, etc. According to the original idea, this is a memorial space (although today it is our only exhibition hall), the task of which was to switch people from everyday life and set them up to view the main exhibition, which will be located in the second phase building.
It all ended with stories of Ukrainians who, despite the genocide and other trials, won: we defended and built an independent state, we have a nation, achievements. But the war made changes. A full-scale invasion took place, and we realised that this form of exhibition could no longer be the final one. We have found a solution, and I hope we will present the artistic concept to the public soon.
Anastasiia Platonova: If we do not reveal the secret of the artistic concept at the level of the general idea, what is the general idea? How do we connect the story that has already happened and the one that is happening now?
Lesia Hasydzhak: The general idea of the future main exhibition is to show the full and true story of the crime of genocide, from the prerequisites, causes, and the mechanism that was thought out and used to the practices of survival and the victory of truth and goodness. We will connect 90 years of history and the present in the part of the story about the mechanism of genocide, in the parallel of the present and the Holodomor. These are things and symbols that we encounter quite often.
As an example, we have a witness, a woman from the Zhytomyr region who survived the Holodomor; Liubov Yarosh and her two grandsons are defending Ukraine today. This woman weaves camouflage nets at the age of 103. The red line, the quintessence of the second stage exhibition, is not about crying and reinforcing the image of the victim, which has been used for years. Our task is to show our national strength and indestructibility, which is stronger than ever, which gave us the strength to withstand decades of occupation and revive the state. And thanks to it, we are, we have been and we will be.
Anastasia Platonova: Has the vision of the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide as an institutional function changed in more than two years? What are we about? Or perhaps we should talk about something more publicly and engage communities and audiences more?
Lesia Hasydzhak: It has changed, and it hasn't. On the one hand, we clearly see our function, our tasks, and what we want to be as an institution in five years. On the other hand, the mission that the museum set for itself a few years ago has definitely changed because it doesn't quite work. It's all "never the same" or "never again." As for publicity, I am working on it.
Over the past two years, we have shown that a museum is about people. Different people are behind different work, and every result is the result of the team's work. One leader will do nothing and is worthless. We are also working on engaging communities or audiences, but this is also a complicated story because every decision has additional challenges.
Anastasiia Platonova: At the end of 2022, I attended a museum conference where a representative of the Ministry of Culture said that we had 1200 museums. The numbers vary. But nevertheless...
Lesia Hasydzhak: No one knows the exact number. Because there are public museums, unregistered museums, so-called "folk" museums, municipal and national museums, museums attached to educational institutions and enterprises - there are several thousand in total. However, the basic ones, which keep the state part of the museum fund, number 800, give or take 20, according to the latest data.
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