Heirdom

Heirdom is a series about Ukraine's complicated relationship with its past and rethinking of its heritage through the pain and trauma of the ongoing war

The war in Ukraine did not begin in 2022 or even 2014. For centuries, empires—above all, Russia—have tried to absorb this land, suppress its language, culture, and memory through various tools of oppression and revisioning history to fit the narrative, erasing Ukrainian identity. Today’s invasion is a continuation of this strategy, not only with bombs but also with erasure of everything Ukrainian, by inventing new narratives, using old tools of destruction and repression, as well as new tools for disinformation to rewrite history once again.

This series follows Ukrainian cultural institutions as they resist by remembering. In museums and institutions studying and preserving culture, people decide what to evacuate and save, what to display, and what to say about their past through the ongoing trauma of war. But it is not a project about museums, but a reflection on layered, often painful self-realization of what is your own heritage and the fragile work of self‑definition through the pain of war in real time.

Which parts of our history and which parts of our present have formed us — and which ones will help us form our future?

What is our Heirdom?