Vytautas the Great War Museum reacted very quickly to the geopolitical situation in our region and has actively created and curated events and exhibitions dedicated to the ongoing war in Ukraine since 2024. During these ten years, we have learned, that then talking about the war we need to thing about:
1. Providing thorough historical context for the conflicts discussed, elucidating events leading to the war, its causes, and global ramifications is essential.
2. Embracing diverse perspectives avoids bias, including viewpoints of various nations, soldiers, civilians, and marginalized groups affected by the war.
3. Human stories are pivotal in discussing war experiences. Highlighting diverse individual narratives humanizes war's impact, fostering emotional connections with historical events.
4. Implement educational programs tailored for schoolchildren to explain geopolitical situations. Special guided tours and workshops deepen visitor engagement.
5. Incorporate elements of memorialization, such as dedicating spaces or showcasing artworks, to honor those who served and lost their lives.
6. Address ethical considerations related to war, emphasizing the impact on civilian populations, consequences of wartime decisions, and lessons for preventing future conflicts.
7. Highlight post-war reconstruction efforts, including rebuilding, reconciliation, and positive stories of cooperation after conflict.
8. Provide spaces for reflection and contemplation within the museum to help visitors process strong emotions evoked by war exhibits.
9. Engage the local community, particularly if the war has direct regional connections, by collecting oral histories, involving community members in curation, and fostering dialogue around the exhibit.
Over the past several decades, great strides have been made to make museums and art galleries highlighting complex and delicate issues. With the surge of wars worldwide, museums in turbulent countries, known as “Powder Kegs” no longer step back to discuss wars with children. Acknowledging the tension, circumstances, even the inevitability, museums no longer place children at the periphery when addressing war issues. This study focuses on two cases, exploring how museums bring wars to children through different education methods.
At the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, an immersive storytelling play equipped with motion-sensing device has gain popularity among children. The play is adapted from the children’s book “Unexpectedly(冷不防)”, depicting the struggles of a Taiwanese poet and his daughter during war. The play encourages children to physically interact, while reflecting on how wars could strike on different aspects of daily lives. Another case ‘Childhood Under the Siege: Sarajevo 1992-1995’, curated by War Childhood Museum, Bosnia, exhibits in Seoul Museum of History, South Korea. The exhibition features objects and testimonies donated by those who experienced war as children. Each story reveals the impact and traumatic memories of this complex, life-changing experience, while also representing the resilience and strength of vibrant striving instinct during and after conflict. The exhibition engages visitors with various child-friendly sensory activities such as different age-grouped activity booklets, or chosen scents and sounds customized for enhancing experience.
The study analyzes how two different methods soften the delicate topic, making wars less distant from individuals’ imagination, and aiming to sow seeds of peace in young learners’ hearts. It was found that while both interact-oriented play and displaying childhood objects avoid brutal and violent materials, the strategy still reaches its purpose on intriguing awareness, and educating how should children act and strive during war. Moreover, the concept of childhood lies behind the strategies will be examined in detail, as it explains the society’s expectations for children as learners, and shows the value of a museum experience referring wars to young child. More significantly, creating a comfortable space for children to engage with wars issues in museum.
Antiquities smuggling, one of the most heinous forms of modern organized crime, rapidly grows around the globe. Like other countries rich in antiquities, Greece has taken a heavy toll in the theft of its monuments. Through international rings, archaeological artefacts end up in museums and private collections abroad, stripped of their natural environment, cut off from the past and the history of the people who created them. Collective memory, that is people’s identity, is wounded. In order to raise public awareness on the subject, the Directorate of Archaeological Museums, Exhibitions, and Educational Programs, in collaboration with the Directorate of Documentation and Protection of Cultural Goods of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, developed a mobile cultural unit entitled “Stolen antiquities, peoples without memory”. The cultural unit, travelling around Greece and hosted in public archaeological museums, becomes a focal point for the implementation of various activities providing stimulation, promoting interaction and dialogue, and stressing the importance of protecting endangered cultural heritage. This initiative aims at pointing out aspects of illicit trafficking of antiquities, such as causes of the phenomenon and motivations of smugglers, operation of international rings, catastrophic results in collective memory, measures to be taken for the prevention and confrontation of this criminal activity. The educational tools include an animation video, world maps illustrating the routes of illicit trade, booklets, exploration of objects and illustrations, narration of key stories, role-playing, imagination and speech games, creative writing, arts and crafts workshops, and an adventurous mystery solving floor game. This presentation aims at highlighting the use of the above tools, in order to inspire and sensitize local communities, and especially young audiences, on the social value of archaeological heritage and the disastrous consequences of antiquities smuggling.
FLENK collective in partnership with Museums and Galleries of New South Wales created a learning resource for Occurrent Affair, an exhibition by proppaNow from The University of Queensland Art Museum that is touring nationally across nine museum venues across Australia from Feb 2023 - Apr 2025. proppaNOW is one of Australia’s leading cultural collectives, exploring the politics of Aboriginal art and culture, and provoking, subverting and re-thinking what it means to be a ‘contemporary Aboriginal artist’.
The development of the education resource was led by FLENK member, Dr Emma Hicks, (Gamilaroi) and Merindah Funnel (Tubba-Gah, Wiradjuri) an ongoing FLENK collaborator with contribution from FLENK member Nicole Barakat and supported by the full collective. It was created as a first nations led resource, centering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and working collaboratively as we believe that multiple perspectives allows the co-creation of richer, more meaningful connections and knowledge/s.
In June 2023, we presented the education resource at an Education Symposium hosted at The National Art School Gallery, Sydney touring venue. Where M&G NSW brought together education, programming, and curatorial staff, as well as First Nations gallery collaborators and local Elders from the touring venues across Australia. We lead a session showcasing the resource content and modelling our approaches to create confidence with the staff and facilitators in addressing these topics in the galleries and with groups when the touring exhibition visits their venues.
The resource supports audiences to create safer spaces and encourages audiences to connect through their own experiences, creating empathy and encouraging people to sit with their uncomfortability, address unconscious biases and take away deeper understandings. We use a range or interactive activities throughout as creative ways to support audiences see through different perspectives and facilitate spaces around challenging issues .
We model best practice approaches for connecting with and discussing the politics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and culture, the current socio-political, economic and environmental issues, while celebrating the strength, resilience and continuity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with audiences.
https://www.flenk.org/occurrent-affair
https://mgnsw.org.au/sector/exhibitions/now-showing/occurrent-affair
The obsession with memory, characteristic of our time, raises the fundamental question of how to find new reconciliatory forms for processing trauma, actively involving the community (Huyssen, 1995). Memorial museums are often coded as sacred spaces for reflection, obliging us to confront the absurdities of history, which can lead to confusion; hence, their contents require the support of mediators to facilitate understanding. This intervention aims to analyze how art can be an effective intermediary within memorial museums, which have the challenging task of recounting painful historical events to the public, events that have caused collective traumas within communities. Specifically, through the case of the Ustica Memorial Museum and the educational workshop Testimone Manifesto, curated by Senza Titolo, we aim to highlight how the museum's educational activities, combined with the work of the artist Boltanski, provide a meaningful educational experience for the public. The artistic expressions present in memorial museums represent life stories, activating during engagement with the public, involving them, and capturing their attention. The true challenge for the visitor lies in choosing to engage with the pain of others, to connect with it. The educational activity of the museum is crucial in fostering this dialogue, in opening a safe space for discussion, allowing the public to become active agents in the construction of knowledge and awareness towards the history and society in which we live.
Bibliograpfhy
Caruth C., Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Jhon Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Simon N., The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz, Museum 2.0, 2010.
Sirok K., Museum and contested histories. Between memory and oblivion, International Conference, National museum of contemporary History, Lubiana, 5-6 october 2017.
Sismondi A.M., Il segno di Ustica. L’eccezionale percorso artistico nato dalla battaglia per la verità, Bologna, Cue Press, 2021.
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