Post by OBMIN

Made in Kyiv, 1784. Understood in London, 2025 Some stories are worth recalling. Like this one. Two pairs of silver altar gates, made in Kyiv around 1784 by Alexis Timothy Ishchenko, sit in the Victoria and Albert Museum 's Gilbert Collection in London. They came from the Kyiv-Pechers'ka Lavra . They are among the most elaborate objects of their kind anywhere outside an Orthodox church. For years, the museum's understanding of them was thin. So the V&A went to the source: a collaboration with the curatorial team at the Lavra itself to re-examine and deepen what is known about the gates. That work led further. A PhD researcher, Ada W., placed at the V&A, identified other Ukrainian material in the collection — including woodcuts from the 1920s by the Boychukists, a school of Ukrainian modernism most of Europe has never heard of. We hear a version of this at every conference we run. A Ukrainian curator knows exactly what an object is, where it was made, what it was for — knowledge held for decades, sometimes generations. What the V&A did was ask. And the collection got richer for it. Every European museum has that conversation available to it, and each one makes the record a little truer. 🔗 Read the V&A's announcement: https://lnkd.in/ds7JfZhB If your institution holds Ukrainian objects and no Ukrainian curator has ever been asked about them, that's a fixable problem. There are 156 museums in the OBMIN network with the expertise to answer. Message us and we'll make the introduction. #OBMIN #museum #future #UkrainianHeritage #CulturalDiplomacy #KyivPecherskLavra #MuseumCollections Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London