2025 is coming to an end. Throughout this year, the War Childhood Museum Ukraine’s team created exhibitions, launched educational programs, and opened spaces for dialogue about the experience of childhood in wartime.
Today, we are sharing the key moments of 2025 with you.
📚 Book Arsenal: Books as Support In Wartime
This year, the War Childhood Museum Ukraine took part in the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival with a pop-up exhibition about books that provide support in wartime. We presented 12 stories of children for whom reading became a source of strength and resilience.
About 1,600 visitors shared their own comfort books and wrote their titles on a special wall. In this way, a living dialogue emerged between the exhibits and the audience — about experience, memory, and support.
🎨 IMBALANCE Laboratory and Exhibition
In 2025, we launched IMBALANCE, a contemporary art and documentation laboratory — a space for teenagers to explore themselves and the world around them through artistic practices.
The result of three months of work was an exhibition featuring the works of eight teenage girls. Through memories of their hometowns, inner conflicts, the search for support, and self-acceptance, the participants documented the experience of growing up during war. These works became not only personal statements but also reflections of an entire generation’s experience.
🕊️ Exhibition on Childhood During World War II in Lviv
To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, together with After Silence, we presented an exhibition featuring testimonies of witnesses to wartime childhood from that period.
These stories help reveal the diversity of experiences and, from a historical distance, reflect on the continuity of the phenomenon of childhood during war in Ukraine.
✊ “The Power of Resistance”: Exhibition for the Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea
As part of the Forum marking the Day of Resistance to the Occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, we presented the exhibition The Power of Resistance.
Seven objects and seven stories of children forced to leave their homes told of the consequences of occupation, attempts to erase identity, and the militarization of education. The exhibition served as a reminder of how an aggressor shapes childhood — and why resistance matters, even at the youngest age.
🧠 Workshop Series “Transforming Experience into Knowledge”
We held a series of workshops for researchers and cultural professionals focused on working with personal and local histories.
Participants learned how to transform their own experiences into research, cultural and artistic projects, films, or even institutions that work with memory and community experience.
🗄️ Documentation
Over the course of the year, the museum’s researchers collected more than 690 items and recorded over 295 interviews. Today, the museum’s collection comprises more than 1,445 items and over 840 interviews.
Thank you to everyone who stood with us and supported our initiatives. The museum team wishes you a joyful Christmas season and a happy New Year!
