This content was published on November 7, 2023 – 15:45 November 7, 2023 – 15:45
Rostyslav Averchuk
Lviv (Ukraine), Nov 7 (EFE) – The Museum of Stolen Art is one of several initiatives that have emerged to track and catalog hundreds of thousands of artistic works that Russia has stolen from Ukrainian museums in occupied areas.
The Museum of Stolen Art recreates the paintings online in an effort to facilitate their eventual return and identify those responsible for the thefts.
Where Russian soldiers established secure control over an area of Ukraine, worrying reports soon emerged about the looting of local museums, as seen in the case of Mariupol.
According to the city council, some 2,200 works were removed from the Arkhip Kuindzhi Art Museum in April 2022. A unique collection of Scythian gold was stolen from the Melitopol museum despite staff’s desperate attempts to hide it.
In Kherson at least 10,000 works of art from local museums were hastily covered with cloth and loaded onto trucks days before Ukrainian troops entered the city a year ago.
Art theft is part of a broader attack against Ukrainian identity itself, since works of art are not only stolen but are presented as belonging solely to the Russian cultural heritage and used to defend the “Russianness” of the occupied territories. from Ukraine, Olena Zenchenko, art director of the creative agency “Linza,” tells Efe.
The “Museum of Stolen Art,” an immersive online platform, is one of the first steps in this direction. Some of the most notable paintings from the Arkhip Kuindzhi museum in Mariupol can be seen in what a gallery reproduces for Internet users around the world, including works by painters such as Ivan Aivazovskyi, Mykola Dubovskyi and Kuindzhi himself.
One of the key challenges Zenchenko’s team has faced is the need to find high-quality photographs of the painting and other works of art.
While Mariupol museums have digitized their collections, the situation is worse for other cultural institutions, says Zenchenko.
All images have been collected using open sources and some of the images actually come from Russian-controlled media or were posted online by Russian museums, which now house stolen Ukrainian art.
However, in most cases identifying the location of many works of art is a laborious and time-consuming effort, Oleg Pidkhomnyi, a professor at the Ivan Franko University of Lviv, explains to Efe.
Pidkhomnyi and his team of OSINT investigators initially focused on finding assets owned by Russian oligarchs to ensure they were covered by international sanctions. However, the sheer magnitude of the theft of Ukrainian art also made it a priority.
“Hundreds of thousands of works of art and objects of national historical heritage have been stolen from dozens of museums. Unfortunately we do not have their complete list,” he emphasizes.
To identify stolen art, his team of student volunteers examines works of art on online marketplaces where art objects are sold and advertisements from Russian museums.
Artists are also consulted in an effort to identify the slightest indications that a given work of art may have come from Ukraine.
The mechanism to detect them exists, but what is missing are “heads and hands,” says Pidkhomnyi.
OSINT investigators aren’t just looking for stolen art in Russia. Both Pidkhomnyi and Zenchenko emphasize the importance of international cooperation in this context.
However, all hope has been lost for the thousands of works of art destroyed in the bombings, fires and even floods caused by the Russian invasion.
Zenchenko’s project seeks to recreate Polina Raiko’s museum of naïve art, which was destroyed following the collapse of the Kakhovka dam this summer.
“Our project is currently in the first draft phase, which we can show to our potential partners. We need many more funds to cover the museums that have suffered because of Russia,” stresses Zenchenko.EFE
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2023-11-07 19:06:12
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