Thank you very much for your invitation.

Yeah, sure. Odessa is really a pearl of Ukraine. We are located on the Black Sea. Our museum is a pearl of a pearl. It’s like a highlight and main part of our city. The Odessa Fine Arts Museum became a national in October of last year, and what for? Actually, we are one of the most modern and the most progressive museums in Ukraine, because we make a lot of effort to keep not just paintings and sculptures, but to keep people connected with each other. We want to be not just a museum, which we visit two or three times per life for example. We want to be a social hub, a place where people who are interested in the culture, not just into art, can meet, spend time and have fun, because our idea is that art is fun, art is fun. So something like that, Odessa Fun Arts Museum, here we are.

Actually, if you know some kind of Eastern Europe art, here we are. For example, Ivan Aivazovsky, maybe one of the most famous Marine painters like William Turner, on the same level. Lots of Ukrainian artists, a lot of traditional arts. For example, maybe if you heard about Maria Primachenko, she was a Ukrainian artist, she inspired even Picasso, so he was a fan of Maria Priimachenko. We have Maria Primachenko in our collection. Several weeks ago, Maria's Primachenko museum was destroyed by the Russian Army. It's a good highlight for us to invite her into the world of art, because she is worth it. Who else? A lot. We have Shishkin, we have a lot of Soviet painters. Actually, any name you're interested in inventing Ukrainian and partly Russian art, you can find it in our museum.

Our museum has a really long and hard story because it was grounded in the time of the Russian Empire. It has a history also during the Soviet Union. Right now, it represents independent Ukraine, so of course it's really hard because we have pictures that represent Catherine the Great, who was actually one of the murders of the Ukrainian nation. Also we have a portrait of Joseph Stalin. Sometimes it's hard to talk about it on excursions. But how do we work with it? Our museum represents art from the 16th century to modern art. Last year, we opened up the last curator project of Alexander Roytburd, and I need to make a short introduction who is Alexander Roytburd. Maybe some of our listeners will know his art, but he is one of the most famous Ukrainian artists, modern artists. He's called the father of postmodernism. He was also our director and my close friend. He made the first project in Ukraine, in the history of Ukraine, that tried to represent the last century of Ukrainian art. So step by step, all the things that we went through, so from the 1920s to 2020s, something like that. It's the first systematically represented Ukrainian art through all the views of Soviet arts, through all the taboos and how we work with it. Just being disconnected with our roots, with our past, leads to the same mistakes that we made in the past. We want to have these mistakes in our hands, not in our backs. The representation, for example, of Catherine the Great, who actually turns into slavery parts of Ukrainian citizens, actually makes us remembering through what things our nation went through. And actually representing Joseph Stalin, it makes us remember that ok, dictators are bad things. Actually, currently, it's a good thing to remember.

That's why in 1865 Odessa citizens, Odesa’s patrons, came together just to make some kind of an association, organisation, just to make everything to increase cultural level. Actually, they grounded our museum as a point of finding people that understand you, to make it a bank of arts, to make it a bank of cultural background of our country. What is the difference between, for example, Odessa, Kyiv and Lviv, as you mentioned? Kyiv was the capital, Kyiv was the capital of Ukraine during the Soviet Union and actually today, so a lot of money went there. A lot of people wanted to support Kyiv museums, everything that comes in Ukraine goes to Kyiv straight. Odessa is a little bit different of a story because everything that is done in Odessa is done by the people themselves. Everything is done by patrons, everything is done by citizens. This museum is a result of just citizens willing to have something like our museum, to have some kind place like this. It's not like a governmental project, it is really a wheel of soul just to make it.

And actually, from the media I know that a lot of museums have that problem. A boring museum is a dead museum because when nobody comes, it is just a building. It's like the difference between a house and a home. So the same thing, it was a house and Roytburd made it a museum. In which way? He found the people who can support us. He granted fundraising, patron organisation that was named after the main Odessa Fine Arts Museum patron, Marazli. He was one of the rulers of our city a lot of years ago, and actually he gave money to buy this building, to create the museum. So our patron organisation, our club is called the Marazli Club, and people who want to support art can join it, and paying some amount of money every year, they can support staff to come in, new researchers to join the museum. And actually, all this crazy situation that was with our building, with our collection, they also support to change it. So they bought new frames, and they supported us in making a renovation of the building. The funniest part is that our government blames Roytburd that he made a renovation of some holes, and because of it, he was denied from being a director. Yeah, it was really funny. We had a lot of problems with that. One year he worked as a director, not being a director, because the judge declined the decision of his appointment. So a crazy story here. The story of the renovation and recreation of our museum is based on being not thankful to the city government, it was just a fight against them. Right now, everything changed, because right now actually Ukraine has changed. What else changed? The attitude of the people. When I was in our museum six years ago, I saw just grandmothers with their grandchildren, and actually some old lady said that, ok, my little boy, this is a good painter. Grandma, why is he a good painter? I don't know. Children didn't know what to say, they were bored and people were actually bored. Now, I am one of the heads of the children department in the museum, and children go there and bring their grandparents with them. Everything changed as it could be.

So what shall we do? I am a researcher, I am researching our collection because Ukrainian art is not so deeply researched, as, for example, European Baroque or Renaissance. There is a lack of information, there is a lack of archives, because after the Second World War, a lot of archive information was simply destroyed. For example, the history of our museum begins in 1945 because all the documents before that were partly destroyed. Now our task is to recreate the story, to know more about the masterpieces that we are responsible for. What else? My responsibility is also to make these researchers not as boring as they could be. Every information that I get shall be transported to the people, because what is the reason for our work? The reason for our work is just to make the society we are working for know more about masterpieces they are responsible for. For example, all the pieces of our collection belong to Ukrainians, to every Ukrainian, and I see my work as making every Ukrainian closer to think they have a collection, because it's their collection, first of all. My work is to take this information, to find this information, take it and recreate it into something that everyone would like to listen to. Not everyone, but I will make everyone listen to it. So this is my work. That's why my high points are fun arts, because it's my mission, I can see that my mission is to make everyone fall in love with art. Because I know that sometimes, actually in even modern art, that seems some kind of varied, some kind of hard to understand, and a lot of people are scared of it, because they think that they will feel stupid, they will understand nothing, and go home with bad emotions, thinking that ok, that was a great artist, because when I was a kid, my grandma told me that it was a great artist. That's why I took a selfie in front of this picture, and posted it on Instagram.

Come and don't take selfies in front of our pictures, and I'm gonna make beautiful photos of you, instead of selfies. I can make it, I can organise it.

I studied culture at Odessa's Mechnikov National University. I was actually a very early bird. I came into the museum just in search of volunteer practice, because I knew that without a practice background, nobody will be interested in me and I will never get a job. That's why I came as a volunteer to the Odessa Fine Arts Museum, just to help to, I don't know, bring chairs or do something else just to be into this team, just to be closer to the museum, and maybe, it was my dream that one day, I can be a part of this team and I can be one who works there. And actually, I had a volunteer practice, but it was just three hours. After three hours of my volunteering, I had a long conversation with one of my current colleagues. We discussed about arts, we talked about some kind of painters that were exposed in our museum, and actually what was the point - I was clever, so he liked it, and he decided to tell about me to Alexander Roytburd, our director, just him to decide if he is interested in me. After that, I was told that ok, I can have some time just to walk around the museum, to listen for excursions for free, because I'm a volunteer, and after 15 minutes of me walking around the museum, I was asked to go to the administration part, to have a conversation with the director. My first thought was, what have I done wrong? I touched nothing, I broke nothing, what is wrong? When I came in, I saw Roytburd, and actually, I was a hard fan of his art, and one of my biggest dreams was just once in my life to say hello to this great person. I came in and that great person was lying on the sofa, barefoot, and he had a not very pleasant face. He was looking at me with a question, ok, girl, what are you doing here? I was waiting here for a person just to have a conversation with. Who are you? I said, hi, my name is Anna, I am 19 years old. How are you? And after maybe 20 minutes of conversation, he asked me a lot of questions. I found myself like really absolutely dumb. But after 20 minutes, he asked me how much time do I have per month? I said that all the time in the world I can give to our museum. After that, he asked me, can I write something, so can I write? I said, of course I can write. He said, ok, so here is your paper, here you are, please take a pen, and please write that from that day you're going to be a part of our museum. That's how after three hours of volunteering, I became a part of the museum. First, I was just an excursion member.

Now the museum is occupied with teenagers, I can say it like that, and these teenagers make creative things, because we make creative things by being online, into digitalization, into being open with people. For example, right now, our Instagram is one of the most sociable parts of Odessa Instagram at all. And even during war, when people are scared and when people need to have some kind of support, they text not to politics, they text us and actually our museum got a lot of messages during the last months, about just simply hey, Odessa Fine Arts Museum, how are you? Can you tell me something interesting about pictures? We will say yes, of course, and we organised streams, we organised story making about the history of the museum. So yeah, half of our team is young, but actually, these are the best people I've ever met. These people are so proud of being part of this team and they actually work there because their heart needs it. The best part in that, the best part in meeting these best people here is the elderly part of our team. Actually, at first, I was scared of them, because I thought that they won’t understand what I was doing there. But how they support us, it's first time I see that elderly people who need to be, I don't know, some kind of disturbed with young people entering their church, I can say, because the museum for them I think is a temple, someone so young entering their temple, but they organised such a supportive atmosphere, so that they can transfer their knowledge. They are always happy to tell me everything that they know and a little bit more. Right now, both of our parts, elderly and young, work as one body. Of course, Roytburd was the heart of the body. Actually, the beats of the body makes it not to be dead as I told before, that our museum was a dead body. Roytburd was the heart that started beating. We are another part. Actually, I'm not sure which parts of the body am I. Yeah, maybe it depends on the situation. But now everything works like one thing. And of course, the elderly part of our team, they are the brains, they are memory, they transfer that knowledge. We are hands and bones, hands and feet, because we are running, we're taking, we're creating. Using that knowledge and using that memory, that experience, we recreate it into something that makes us go further and further and further.

Zombie stories.

Yeah. First of all, our audience supports us really hard. Their support is incredible. Every time they come... What I mentioned, that every year and every month, younger and younger and younger people come by themselves. So if, for example, two years ago, I can say just about the last two years, because I'm just two years in this museum, two years ago, I saw that the average age of our visitors is 20, 25, 30, 35 and older. And right now I can say that teenagers come for their first dates, not in the cinema, but in the museum. Actually, I cannot imagine it, because when I was, for example, 13 and I had my first dates, of course, nobody had an idea that the first date in their life can be in a museum. Because for us, a museum was a place where we were taken by our teachers with a strict ice, we were forced to go there. I can see with these teenagers, they're 13 years old, they're holding their hands, and they're sitting somewhere in our halls and trying to know how to kiss each other, actually, maybe reading that in Wikipedia, how they need to kiss. And actually, that touches my heart very much. But this gap about which I told you before, that people don't want to come to museum because they're afraid of feeling themselves stupid, this gap goes lower and lower and lower, because they can see that working into a museum can be interesting. For example, when my friends talk with me, their first question is, ok, why are you working in the museum? And then when I start to talk about it, when I start to express all the things that I make there and all the people I met there, they said, ok, we got it, ok, we definitely should come there because it sounds like, I don't know, Disneyland, but with pictures. I said, yeah, it's better than Disneyland because you won't be sick after that.

Sorry, but what is this about the British Museum being boring? What? Actually, when I was 11 years old, when I first went into the British Museum, I was so shocked that I spent seven hours there. I don't think that any museum can be boring. I think the boring thing can be the people around you. If people around you are fun, I don't believe that history, that art can even bore someone or somebody or something, actually.

And now we come to the not so funny part. Yeah, I'm currently in Berlin, because I came here with my little brother and my mother. I was forced to bring them here, because I don't want my little brother to wake up three or four times during the night because of alarms. And actually, because it is safe here. What is the current situation in Ukraine? The best way to represent it is just to show you the bare walls in our museum, in all the museums in Ukraine. All the collections are hidden, if it was possible to hide them, they're hidden. Actually, I was one of the people who came on the 24th of February to evacuate the collection. At five o'clock, we woke up because of bombing on our city. I never thought when I read about the Second World War, when I read about the First World War, I never thought that living right now and knowing about these stories from books, from elderly people, can ever happen in my life. At 12 o'clock, we woke up from the bombing sounds, and at six o'clock we were already in the museum. Actually, that time I felt myself incredibly stupid because me and my boyfriend and our cat, because we live on the 18th floor, we couldn't leave our cat because we didn't know how hard the bombing would be. We took our cat, we took one backpack, a little bit of our documents and money, and we ran to the museum because I felt that it was my responsibility. Right now, turning back, I understand that, I'm not sure it was the right solution, but it was the only solution I had. So not running from but running too, because if we didn't make it, who would? Because the Odessa Fine Arts Museum is a baby of the people, it is a baby of Odessa's citizens. It's actually a work of art, not just painting or sculptural arts, it's work of human art. How much people gave into that? How much do people care about it? I did the same thing that people all these years made for this museum. I gave myself to it. We came there, it was chaos because nobody knew what to do, nobody knew how safe it would be. And during the day we were bringing pictures from one side to another. And the scariest and weirdest part was cutting these wires on which pictures were hanging, and when I cut it down with normal scissors, I saw that all the wall was another colour, it was a different colour from the place behind the picture, because these pictures, the last time they were taken off was in the Second World War. At that moment, I understood that right now I'm doing the same thing as people 80 years ago, and that was the scariest.

Yeah. But another point – I cannot talk long term into this depressive voice. So the best part is about team, about people. Even during those times, our team was wonderful. I'm sure that some of them will listen to us after the recording, so I want to thank everybody who was there. I want to say to all the people who didn't know who these people are, guys, the workers of Odessa Fine Arts Museum are the best people in the world. Just know it, if you ever meet someone who says that he works in the Odessa Fine Arts Museum, kiss his arms because those arms made a wonderful thing. They saved the collection, almost. And there came not just our workers, there were parents of our workers. There were husbands and wives who also came into the museum. They weren't forced to make it. All of my friends were into shelters at that second, so while we were in the museum, all of my friends, they were somewhere into the underground, hiding and waiting for this bombing to stop, and we are not, and everyone was there.

I understand that that situation happens in all the museums in Ukraine. Actually, I love our nation so much that I couldn't imagine that I can love something so hard. These people who can be brave, who can forget about themselves, just to make something bigger, and something bigger was done. Yeah. What else is funny? Now I have a lot of funny photos from the day. It was a scary moment, but there was a lot of humor, of course, because living in Odessa without humor cannot be imagined. Odessa is the capital of humor in Ukraine, we say it like that.

There's one of the most famous pictures of Valentin Serov, also a Russian sculptor, a Russian artist, painter, and that was a painting, and actually, in our museum, we have the same sculptures also made by Valentin Serov. He was very, very famous. And all these two years and the years before I started working there, it was one of my favourites works. And that day, somewhere at 11 o'clock, on the 24th of February, I actually finally took a photo when I'm stealing the sculpture that is called “Stealing of Europe”. So it was stealing of stealing the Europe. I was actually very, very happy about it. So now I have maybe the best photo in the collection. And, thinking that somewhere in 100 years, some of, I don't know, my great grandchildren will research the story, and my little bit of crazy face somewhere into a scientific article about terrific workers who saved the collection at that time, and this photo of stealing of stealing.

Of course there was. The situation that I described before, that our museum had hard problems with our government, not with our government at all, but with our local government from our region. But everything changed and now we have a lot of support. We became national status and we got a lot of support, and our museum also has money. That's the main point, because we are in a lot of, and maybe we are one of not so many museums who earn by themselves, because art is actually very [inaudible 39:50] field, so maybe all the museums, they live because of financial support from governments and people. We also partly, but also earn by ourselves. That's why we could buy a lot of stuff that we needed to pack everything, to hide everything. Of course, the government helped us with the coordination of all this process. Of course, we couldn't decide by ourselves, what shall we do, and decide to evacuate or not to evacuate, to hide. So all the coordination was from the government. Of course, I cannot tell and I cannot say where all the pictures are. I know but I won’t, it's my tiny secret.

Yeah. I'm currently in Germany, and actually, I came to this interview from another interview. Today, I was actually hired into a German museum where I can work for a little time just to get more knowledge.

Thank you. Now I'm the youngest worker of two museums, not just one. Here I will spend, I'm not sure how much time will I be forced to stay here, but German museums want to support me as hard as they can, to give Ukrainian researchers as much help as they can. Because of them, because of it, here's a lot of projects and a lot of cultural funds that organise grant programs, which are targeted to help Ukrainian artists, Ukrainian researchers, scientific workers, to find a place to work here, to earn some living, because we actually don't want to bother European people with our social support. Of course, we know that every Ukrainian in Europe, it's not so easy for European people to pay for us being here. That's why every one of us wants to work, wants to help this country while we are here because this country welcomed us so well, and to gain some kind of knowledge. For example, one of my current colleagues is a researcher, and she makes professional, she researches the backgrounds, the provenances of works. One of her targets was to develop, to research the history of paintings that were lost after the Second World War. She actually succeeded in that a lot of times. So right now, I'm hardly dreaming. I'm actually very hardly dreaming about taking that knowledge from her because I think that this experience will be very helpful when I come home, experience into finding missing works of arts, because evacuation never ends without losing something. Every time, even the best organised evacuations, even the evacuation that was very slow and very gentle, every time something is lost. And our evacuation wasn't gentle, it wasn't slow and it wasn't gentle. Right now, a lot of people here, I support them in coordination. I came as one of the first in Germany, and now I am into the program. I translate everything for them because I speak, as you hear, a little bit of English, and I also know German. I help them to translate all their documents and to connect them with other museum workers, to help them to find a place here to organise grant programs. So people helping people, and that is the best illustration.

Ok. I have a weird idea. Maybe it would be Museum of museums.

There is no opportunity, even if I spent my whole life just in traveling, traveling, traveling, I would never visit all the museums there are in the world, because sometimes the museum can be just a room of some old lady that she collected for her whole life, it can also be a museum. Maybe a museum of museums can represent the diversity of different styles, a representation of the personal history, diversity of people who created these places. Maybe it can be interesting to just collect in one place all these beautiful places that do the same thing in different parts of our world. I think museums are lighters that light up the souls of people, and they are this power who can make people feel alive, because when you come there, you slow down, and you feel how much beauty people create, and how wonderful, how unique, and how outstanding is the history of humanity. And maybe yeah, museum of museums, because museums in my point of view, are the results of our difference from animals. It's a creation instead of destroying. Actually, specifically now, when my country is filled with destruction, with war, with anxiety, I think museums are the places that are stable. I think museums are the places that remind us that life goes on. These museums, these buildings, these pictures, they saw a lot of wars, they saw a lot of human lives, a lot of deaths. And if they survived all of that, how can we not? So yeah, we need to help them to survive something else. I hope that all these buildings, all these pictures will see the future of our country, and maybe they will be part of the museum of museums, where I can tell other people about passion, about my passion, collection, the collections. Yeah, something like that.

I hope so. I hope it was the funniest not because of my mistakes.

Maybe they can go to our website and our Instagram. Our Instagram is odessa_finearts_museum. You can just look for it, and you're gonna find it. After the beginning of the war, we translated nearly all our posts in English, so that more people can be in our topics. We also have our YouTube. There is not so much right now, but we are trying to fill it. I hope that next year we're going to be more open for international communication. But after the end of the war, I hope that people would like to come and see. Actually, I told you about things that we were rescuing, and I want people to see what we were rescuing. I invite everyone who is listening now to Odessa, and I hope that we're going to meet there and talk more about Ukrainian arts. And maybe my dream is one day Ukrainian arts would be as famous as, for example, French or Italian or German or English. When you ask me who is represented in our museum, I wouldn't tell just some kind of names that nobody understands except me.

Thank you very much.

At around 38 minutes, Anna talks about a sculpture by the Russian artist Valentin Serov to which she refers as ‘The Stealing of Europe'. Anna makes a pun saying she was ’stealing’ her favourite work named ‘The Stealing of Europe’.

The work is officially called ‘The Rape of Europa’ and was painted in 1910 by Valentin Serov. The original painting is at the Russian Museum, St Petersburg.