International English‑Language Conference“Reframing the Museum. Decolonial Practices in the Context of Central and Eastern Europe”

Participation in the international English‑language conference “Reframing the Museum. Decolonial Practices in the Context of Central and Eastern Europe”, held on 13–14 November 2025 at the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.

I participated in Panel #3: Reshaping the Narrative, presenting a paper in English entitled: “Visualization of Museum Decolonization and Museal Cultural Texts in Ukrainian Cultural Media on Instagram as a Manifestation of Catharsis in Ukrainian Art (2022–2025)”.

One of the central issues in the Russian–Ukrainian cultural confrontation is the question of the cultural and national belonging of certain museal cultural texts (including works by Aivazovsky, Malevich, Kuindzhi, Repin, and others), which were appropriated by Russian culture and for decades presented as Russian, despite their demonstrably Ukrainian origins. The decolonization of the Ukrainian museum sphere therefore involves, above all, the restoration of the proper national attribution of these cultural texts.

The presentation analysed the Instagram content of Ukrainian cultural media from 2022–2025 (including @post.impreza, @sensormedia.ua, @shtukango, svobodadumky.ua, @suspilne.cultura, @kultprostir) in order to identify the digital tools and mechanisms through which the process of decolonizing museums and “appropriated” cultural texts of Ukrainian origin is visualized. This visualization was interpreted as part of the broader process of catharsis in Ukrainian art — a process of renewal and revival, inherently conflict‑generating and intensified by the Russian–Ukrainian war — and as an expression of the role that decolonized cultural texts play within this transformation.

A second area of analysis concerned Ukrainian and European museums in which decolonial practices intensified significantly during the examined period. The focus was placed on institutions that redefined the ways in which museum narratives represent Ukrainian–Russian cultural interactions. Particular attention was given to how these processes were reflected in the content published by Ukrainian cultural media.

Information for the IS PAN website