2024 Conference
SCHEDULE
Identity War in Ukraine: Culture and Heritage on the Battlefield
10:15 – 10:50 a.m.
| Monday, Sept. 23, 2024 at The Getty CenterThis talk will focus on the cultural emergency preparedness and response to the war in Ukraine and the scale of damage to cultural heritage and religious freedom. In 2.5 years since the full-scale war, a few thousand Ukrainian architectural, historical, and religious sites, including museums and galleries, archives and libraries, cultural centers, theatres, philharmonics, and cultural institutions were damaged and over a thousand were destroyed. Facing the threat of large-scale war, the Ukrainian cultural sector quickly self-organized itself to protect collections, venues, and people. Cultural activists, in cooperation with local authorities and communities, turned public spaces into cultural barricades, sheltering monuments and sculptures, facade decorations, and other artistic and historical objects with panels and sandbags. The solidarity of the whole world, coming together to protect culture in times of war is unprecedented in scale. In March 2022, the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) was launched to respond to this crisis. It established a broad network of museums, archives, and library partnerships and coordinated its activities with national and international governmental and nongovernmental organization sectors. One of the legal entities of the public initiative HERI is a nongovernmental Agency for Cultural Resilience, which, with its partners, is actively engaged in the various processes to promote and contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage during wartime, coordination of aid initiatives, assessment and documentation of losses and damages, rescue of the collections, recording oral stories from the ground, museumification and memorialization of war, postwar recovery and modernization of culture, capacity building, and increasing resilience to emergencies.
