Memorial Museum Research Articles

Museum and exhibition presentation of the works of Vitold K. Bialynitsky-Birulya in the context of the evolution of the landscape genre

The article provides an analytical review of the lyrical and poetic works of the artist, presented at the Vitold K. Bialynitsky-Birulya Memorial Museum (Mogilev). Using the permanent exposition “The Art of Vitold K. Bialynitsky-Birulya of the first half of the 20th century” as an example, the museum and exhibition presentation of the works of Vitold K. Bialynitsky-Birulya is examined in the context of the evolution of the landscape genre. The artistic value of the landscapes is considered in the organic unity of the master`s creative work and worldview against the backdrop of the general aesthetic tendencies of his era. The article pays special attention to the analysis of the content side of Vitold K. Bialynitsky-Birulya`s art, exploring his individual artistic concept.

Relentless Atrocities: the Persecution of Hazaras

As one of the main ethnic groups in Afghanistan, Hazaras are Farsi-speaking and mostly Shi’a Muslims in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country. They are also distinguishable by their Asiatic appearance. Throughout Afghanistan’s history, Hazaras have suffered considerably under different regimes, enduring recurring massacres, enslavement, and forced displacement. Despite Afghanistan’s accession to the Rome Statute in 2003, the plight of Hazaras has not improved. Indeed, the assaults on Hazaras have only intensified in recent years, impacting virtually every aspect of their lives. This article argues that the recent and ongoing attacks against Hazaras constitute a crime against humanity. In particular, I show, element by element, that there is a reasonable basis to believe that the assaults on Hazaras amount to persecution based on ethnic and religious grounds pursuant to article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute. Accordingly, the International Criminal Court and the global community must take urgent actions to investigate the relentless atrocities against Hazaras and to hold the perpetrators accountable. Failure to do so, as warned by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, may lead to a full-blown genocide.

Memory from the Margins Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum by Bridget Conley

Memory from the Margins Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum by Bridget Conley

АМБЕДКАРИТЫ И САКРАЛИЗАЦИЯ Б.Р. АМБЕДКАРА В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ИНДИИ

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), a Dalit leader born in the caste of Mahars, received an excellent Western education and advocated the abolition of caste discrimination, is an extremely significant person in the scheduled caste community of modern India. Having given the oppressed castes the opportunity to acquire a new social identity through the adoption of Buddhism, Ambedkar became in their eyes a hero-liberator. Attention to the personality and legacy of Ambedkar began to grow steadily against the background of the arrival in politics of people from the scheduled castes, who were opposed to the politics of hindutva. At present, the significance of the personality of B.R. Ambedkar for the Indian nation is recognized at the highest state level. The leaders of the country open new memorial museum complexes, monuments, refer to the works of Ambedkar in public speeches. From our point of view, we can talk about the inclusion of B.R. Ambedkar in a kind of political pantheon of “great leaders of the past”. Basing on the concept of E. Burns of the euhemerization of political leaders, as well as analyzing printed and sculptural images of Ambedkar, ritual practices and folklore of the ambedkarite community, the author describes the mechanisms of sacralization of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in the modern Republic of India

The sacred memory regime and museum exhibitions during the centenary of the First World War in Russia

The sacred memory regime and museum exhibitions during the centenary of the First World War in Russia

Russian Town Museums and Cultures of Memory

This article is devoted to the theoretical and methodological problematisation of the role played by museums in the formation of memory cultures in small towns. The authors refer to materials from field expeditions (2021–2022) in ten Russian towns selected based on their geographical location, origin, age, and other parameters. The museum network is usually analysed regarding larger cultural centres but this concept applies to smaller towns, where, in addition to local history museums, there are museums of educational organisations and enterprises, art, memorial, and thematic museums. The article proposes a definition of the concept of a culture of memory and develops and describes a typology that includes scientific, memorial, and folklore types of “museum” culture, which realise various approaches to the preservation and formation of the memory of the past. The authors employ various research techniques to study memorisation practices. They use the database on museums of small towns created as part of the project for structural and functional analysis, which makes it possible to present a picture of the country as a whole. Stationary and mobile interviews with town residents clarify the description of museum practices.

An Exploratory Study on the Motivations behind Visiting the Holocaust Museum of Porto

This study aims to identify the reasons why people visit the Holocaust Museum of Porto (HMP) and if other variables (sociodemographic ones, visitors’ similarity with Jewish community members, their knowledge of dark tourism, and experience with other Holocaust-related destinations) also influence such motivators. A quantitative analytical, observational and case-control study was conducted based on a survey of 488 respondents who completed a self-administered questionnaire at the HMP. Statistical data analysis included descriptive statistics, an exploratory factor analysis, a confirmatory factor analysis, convergent validity (through composite reliability and average variance extracted), and discriminant validity (through square roots of the AVE values). The findings reveal that visitors are drawn by factors such as novelty and knowledge-seeking and that the motives for visiting the museum differ according to their sociodemographic characteristics, visitors’ similarity with members of the Jewish community, and their knowledge of dark tourism and experience with other Holocaust-related destinations. Sociodemographic variables, previous practices related to the Holocaust and similarity have an impact on the drivers behind visiting dark places. These results contribute to dark tourism literature with an improved understanding of tourist behavior toward Holocaust memorial museums. In addition to filling a gap, it provides a comprehensive insight into the specific motivators behind visiting the HMP, possibly allowing this museum to better design tourist experiences, thus increasing the potential to attract more visitors and keep alive the memory of such atrocities that cannot be repeated.

Encoding Memory through Multimodality in Modern-Day Memorial Museums

The article is devoted to the use of technology in memorial museums, particularly in those related to genocide.
 The authors use a multidisciplinary theoretical framework using a diverse toolkit from Semiotics, Communication Studies, and Philosophy to explain the benefits and dangers of implementing technology in a memorial museum. The framework makes particular use of Peirce’s idea of unlimited semiosis, Eco’s considerations about the multiplicity of meanings and the “open text”, the existence of not one but two narratives in museums—especially in memorial museums—and Heidegger’s writings on technology especially enframing and revealing which are invoked in order to explain the interplay between technology and memory. 
 Being based in Yerevan, Armenia, the authors formulate their ideas with the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute (AGMI) in mind. This results in practical recommendations of how technology could be implemented in modern-day memorial museums, and identifies the benefits and dangers that must be kept in mind when doing so.
 The specific subject matter of the AGMI plays a part in how this discourse evolves and the framework is assembled through an exploration of the term genocide, the historical events and artifacts that are presented in the museum and the current setup of the museum.

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era by Jie Li (review)

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era by Jie Li (review)

Race, memory and implication in Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising

This article analyses the new Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which tells the largely forgotten story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Greenwood Rising is influenced by the broader global proliferation of memorial museums created to confront historical violence vis-à-vis today’s ‘politics of regret’ and works to centre slavery and racial inequality in American history as well as in contemporary society, representing a new intervention in the mnemonic struggles over slavery and its legacies in the United States. In its adherence to global memorial ethics, Greenwood Rising also places (White) visitors in the position of what Michael Rothberg has theorized as the ‘implicated subject’. However, Greenwood Rising has been highly controversial among Tulsa’s African American community, many of whom see the museum as a ‘symbolic gesture’ intended to obscure ongoing racism and replace material reparations. This controversy raises questions about the limits of memory in the face of ongoing injustice and highlights tensions between increasingly globalized ethics of remembrance and local mnemonic struggles.

Intervention, Return, and Reinterpretation: The Jasenovac Memorial Museum Collection, 1991–2006

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

Poetics of Memory on Dictatorships

This research explores how three memorial museums in “Latin America” exhibit trauma and violence from their respective dictatorial regimes. I analyze the impact of globalization with regard to common Holocaust tropes and themes by examining their content and display techniques via their official virtual platforms. The three memorial museums highlighted in this paper are the Memory and Human Rights Museum (MMDH) in Chile; the Ex Centro Clandestino de Detencion, Tortura y Exterminio (ESMA) in Argentina; and the Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance in the Dominican Republic. I argue that these museums combine Latin American and Holocaust museological techniques and aesthetics in their exhibitions to accomplish two goals: (1) attract an international audience and (2) receive worldwide recognition in universal organizations such as the United Nations (UN) or UNESCO. The efforts implemented by these museums are apparent in their vernacular (the native language spoken in a particular region), display techniques, vision/purpose statements, and their interpretative text.

The Architecture of the House as an Expression of Identity: Topoanalysis of Guilherme de Almeida's Historic House Museum

The architectural elements and interior design choices observable within a historic house museum of an intimate memory can express an identity. Such institutions often build narratives about the home, relating the moment when the honouree had inhabited the house to the cultural aspects of the visitors of the museum. In this sense, a physical and visible world (aspects related to the architecture) reflect intangible, abstract elements (non-physical aspects related to memory). The home thus transcends its sense of shelter to denote traces of personality and functional habits. When transforming a house into a museum while preserving the physical elements, institutions will do well in recognising such aspects as sources of information about the former residents. For that matter, this paper suggests a phenomenological analysis as the means to understand identity traces in spatial elements of a preserved home. As an example of the existent relations between physical and non-physical aspects of architecture and memory, we present a literature review and the analysis of a single case study: the Historic House Museum Casa Guilherme de Almeida, located in São Paulo, Brazil. This study is part of the doctoral thesis developed by the author, which integrates other cases and methods.

Can the Screen Speak?: Museum of Material Memory and the Politics of Display

What if a museum is not built out of cement and stone, but codes on a virtual space? In what ways do virtual platforms operationalise the concept of a museum? The paper explores these questions based on the empirical case study of Museum of Material Memory (MMM) and how it operates on Instagram. To this end, the objectives of this paper are twin fold. Firstly, it investigates the characteristics that make MMM a museum as distinct from a social media blog or a website. And secondly, it explores the politics of curation in relation to conventional physical museums in conjunction with issues thrown up by Instagram as a medium of display. The paper argues that MMM’s virtual mode of operation challenges the methods of heritage conservation envisaged by museums by demonstrating how tangible heritage can be museumised through virtual means. In doing so, MMM lays emphasis not only on the object per se, but also on the relationship that the object may have with its setting and the people around it. Such a model of display democratises expertise by obfuscating the difference between producers and consumers of heritage.

Practice and Thoughts on the Original Traveling Exhibition in the Revolutionary Memorial Museum

Practice and Thoughts on the Original Traveling Exhibition in the Revolutionary Memorial Museum

Saigon’s penalscape: interpreting colonial prisons in Vietnam

ABSTRACT This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been re-purposed, destroyed, or obscured. In response, memorial museums have an important role presenting prison history to international tourists and local visitors alike. Our approach interprets artefacts relating to restraint and torture, the reconstruction of prison cells, and the use of photography in three museums in the city—the War Remnants Museum, the Ton Duc Thang Museum, and the Museum of Southern Vietnamese Women—each featuring recreations of the Tiger Cages from a further notorious prison site, some 200 kilometres southeast of HCMC on the Côn Đảo archipelago. Memoirs, photographs, objects, and plaques from prisons in HCMC and Côn Đảo offer domestic and international tourists narratives stories of Vietnamese resistance to imprisonment. Considering the way former prison sites and museums memorialising prisons can be taken together as a series, we use the concept of the “penalscape” to indicate the contextual links between prison, education, and political struggle in an abolitionist framework.

Japan’s Disaster Memorial Museums and framing 3.11: Othering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in cultural memory

ABSTRACT With the proliferation of several dozen new exhibits and museums dedicated to this specific disaster, the 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, can be considered a turning point in the preservation of disaster memory in Japan. Although there is limited research on disaster museums, they play a significant role in shaping cultural memory of 3.11, as they are regarded as reliable, objective institutions of memory. Through analysis of 17 government-established 3.11 museums, this research explores the following questions: How do public disaster museums frame their representations of 3.11, and what official narrative is created within the cultural memory of the triple disaster in Japan? Drawing from analysis of the museums’ mission statements and exhibitions, and interviews with curators and museum staff, we argue that most disaster museums support narratives of overcoming hardships to contribute to a better future, showing continuity with narratives typical of other memorial museums such as WWII, or pre-3.11 disaster museums. In contrast to the commemoration of war and its influence on cultural memory, disaster museums have received relatively little scholarly attention. Yet, these forward-looking messages, combined with tendencies of museums to focus on local disaster experiences and emphasize disaster risk reduction with an artificial separation between man-made disasters vs. natural hazards, contributes to an othering of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in cultural memory, as an outlier in Japan’s long history of disasters. Without full representation of the compound disaster, understanding of 3.11 and the effective transmission of the intended lessons is severely limited.

History as Seen Through Postcards: A Story of the Lodz Ghetto—Total Isolation

Thesis. This study explores the role of postcards as a historical, documentary, and artistic source depicting the events of the Holocaust, focusing on postcards written or received by inhabitants of the Lodz Ghetto. 78 postcards were translated into Hebrew and on exhibition at the Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Museum in Israel. Research indicates that the postcards served as an authentic and rare source of information as well as understanding the emotions of Jews whose lives were overshadowed by the threat of annihilation. Methods. The study is a qualitative one, based on the grounded theory approach. Analysis is established on identifying and characterising recurrences in the raw material of findings, with a clear definition of the unit of analysis, to build a hierarchy of the recurrences and themes, and to construct a theoretical model that explains the reality under investigation. Researchers in this method gather information about the life patterns of their subjects as well as the organizational and social structures. Grounded theory assumes that all people who have shared life circumstances also have shared social and psychological patterns, which even if not consciously formulated or expressed grow from the shared experiences. Results and conclusion. In-depth analysis reveals the historical events from the perspective of the postcard writers, as they experienced them in the ghetto. The postcards sent to the ghetto by relatives and acquaintances reveal their writers’ hopes of reuniting with their family or their extreme despair as they cope with the loss of their family.

Repurposing the Ruin to Remember: Multimodal Rhetoric and Cultural Memory in the Post–Soviet Memorial Museum

The memory turn in the humanities has been crucial for understanding the rhetorical work memorials and museums perform for the state. However, the postmodern development of the hybrid memorial museum remains underexamined as a unique rhetorical artifact. In this article, I combine postmodern museology with material rhetoric and multimodal argumentation to critique the particular trend of repurposing historical buildings from the commemorated moment in question into the physical memorial museum itself. Building from previous literature exploring juxtaposition as argument, I contend that repurposing ruins into memorial museums uses authenticity to create a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition between the ruin’s former and current life as an argumentative strategy. Such work thus makes the repurposed memorial museum both a container and rhetorical object of memory. To exemplify this, I perform a rhetorical critique in situ of the Memorial Museum of the German Division of Marienborn ( Gedenkstätte Deutsche Teilung Marienborn [GDTM]): a former East German border crossing. I show how GDTM leverages its architectural authenticity through this Janus-faced juxtaposition to curate cultural memory discourses regarding German unification. In conclusion, I posit how further post-Soviet infrastructures and other repurposed memorial museums offer a critical rhetoric that in our political climes is never more needed.

“They didn’t break me either way”. Women, Captivity and Interrogation in World War II: Resurfacing Self-Empowering Narratives

Interrogation and questioning are often remembered as life-changing by those who have been incarcerated in wartime, and they represent a key element of the prisoner of war experience in memories and personal narratives of former captives. However, women’s accounts of interrogation and questioning in World War II are not as easy to find as men’s. Women only rarely fit the definition of POW because even when they were combatants, they hardly were legally so. Perhaps more importantly, female prisoners have not entered the collective memory as strongly as male prisoners, and it is essential to resurface women’s empowering personal accounts and life stories of these experiences in American archives and museums. The in-depth secondary analysis of oral history narratives held at the sound archives of the Veterans History Project within the Library of Congress, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC, provides a series of case-studies to show how narrators were affected by their experiences of incarceration and to what extent their gendered memories fit within the shared memories of captivity in wartime. The article concludes that the way these women came to terms with their violent past challenges ideas about the vulnerability of women in captivity and that their narratives reach surprisingly empowering epilogues.