On May 18, Ukraine celebrated International Museum Day, a holiday designed to highlight the importance of cultural heritage, national memory, and history. On that day, the VOICES Exhibition in the multimedia space of The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation set a stunning record — almost 2,000 people visited it in just one day.

Andriy Palatnyi, the exhibition's line producer and GOGOLFEST's theatre curator, who conducts curatorial tours of the exhibition, noted that on Museum Day, one of these tours was the largest in terms of the number of viewers since the exhibition began on February 22, 2024. 

“On International Museum Day, the VOICES Exhibition was visited by people of all ages - from children to the elderly. During the tours, we focused on communication. Some of the visitors could not hold back their tears... People paid a lot of attention to the artefacts and suitcases on the wall, listened to live stories about the war on tablets, and almost every second person filmed the exhibition on the phone,” said Andriy.

The VOICES Exhibition will run at the Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv until May 26, 2024. It is a living space with art objects that seek to reveal the depth and power of Ukrainians' stories about the war. The exhibition is designed to lead the visitor through darkness to light.

The key element is a triptych of installations that reveal the theme of the loss of home and the question, “What is home? Where is it? What or who is it?”:

  • The City represents abandoned, empty buildings that symbolise Ukrainian cities destroyed by war;
  • The Pillar of Destroyed Life is an installation consisting of real objects and artefacts of war belonging to specific people;
  • The Wall of Figures “Peaceful” depicts people with suitcases on their backs, symbolising those forced to leave their homes because of the war.

Two installations have built-in suitcases with tablets on which you can listen to real stories of people who witnessed the war, collected by The Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. This is part of more than 100,000 stories that the Museum already has. You can find them at the link  Civilian Voices, The Museum of Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. 

You can visit the VOICES Exhibition for free at the following address: 7 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street, Kyiv. Curatorial tours of the exhibition are held every Saturday at 3 p.m.