Special Cargo!

In 2019 Mystetskyi Arsenal held an exhibition about the return of cultural values

back to Ukraine, about the stories of cultural activists who are launching restitution processes. "Special cargo!" is a marking on boxes in which especially valuable

things return to the country.

➢ 2019

The inspiration for creating the main visual of the exhibition was the marking of cargo with stickers depicting manipulation signs in combination with signal markings. We all know the "fragile" symbol very well, but sometimes we get confused about the meanings of colors. Here we can recall the general sense: green is security or permission, and red is attention. I also immediately remembered the wooden box from the Tbilisi Museum with the inscription "fragile culture." So it became the main inspiration for the graphic style and the exhibition itself. The main visual contains a "fragile" icon, but it does not repeat the symbol of broken glass. Instead, I created a label for this type of valuable cargo as ours: it is a fragile painting (the painting that got back from overseas had to become the main highlight of the exhibition). The poster also contains a packaging stripe, which integrates the exhibition name.

Let's dive into an exhibition space.

Together with the museum department, we came up with a concept and format: it should be two halls. And if the first hall is a "warehouse" or a storage room, where art objects are unpacked and kept, the second hall is a "museum." The architecture of such an exhibition is becoming more

like scenography: we have focused on materials and light.

In the entrance area, we see real boxes for transporting works.

Entrance walls contain infographics about what cultural values are returning,

who's doing it, and where they are coming back.

We pass through the curtains of bubble wrap, highlighted in red. It was obvious to use

a bubble wrap in the exhibition because this material is frequently used when transporting

valuables. When entering, one can see huge numbers from the statistics of the returned

cultural property to Ukraine. The size of the figures symbolized the scale of the loss

of Ukrainian cultural heritage.

The sketch of a photo exhibition

Further, we can see a massive of photos. These are reprints of a tiny part of the glass photo positives archive, which disappeared during the Second World War and returned to Ukraine only in 1997. The photos are divided into thematic blocks and mounted on a decorated wall of corrugated cardboard. Descriptive texts, tags, and captions remain us of stickers on postal boxes.

The sketch of a timeline and an installation

A composition of museum frames on a central wall consists of dozens of frames:

some are empty, others have inscriptions. These inscriptions are the names of lost works

known to museum activists. We left some frames blank to show that many lost artworks

are not attributed. Empty frames symbolically have no description. There is also a timeline

for the installation: a visual journey through dates. It shows the progress of restitution legislation.

Now let's pay attention to the exhibit case: it contains archeological objects from the Kherson Museum. On the back wall, there is a fragment of correspondence. It clearly shows how much work, time, and words it took to return 82 archeological artifacts to the Kherson Regional Museum. Rare Books from the library of Metropolitan Flavian returned to the National Historical Library of Ukraine in the early 90s and are displayed next to archeology.

We get through the curtains of the bubble wrap into the next exhibition hall.

Here are seven success stories, so these seven blocks are separated in the space

as if they were deliberately "inserted" here. In my opinion, the dark seafoam blue

shade works very well with the classical paintings, so we chose it for the "museum" part.

Wall sweep of the second exhibition hall with dimensions for mounting

I wanted to show the collection of Easter eggs from the National Museum of Decorative Arts in a new way, to come up with some unexpected move. The idea of showcases with mirrors came to mind: you can see the back of the Easter egg with ornaments, inventory numbers, and damage. All this, for me personally, as a visitor, not a designer, shows that this is a living exhibit with a long story. Secondly, it is simply beautiful and unexpected to present such a traditional art form.