Charlotte Higgins Why museums matter

The violence of war, and all its horror, has a clarifying effect on what really matters in every aspect of life. In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, those caught up in the terrifying events found that language was reduced to its most fundamental function: telling loved ones they were alive. The work of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv was, similarly, refined to its most basic essentials: safeguarding the objects; ensuring they would be there for the next generation.

The researcher Oleksandr Lukianov and his team lived in the museum for a month, dismantling displays of Greek pots and Scythian gold and sending them to safety. After the Russians had withdrawn from the nearby towns of Bucha and Irpin, he and his team went into those once-pleasant commuter towns to collect artefacts. These objects – everything from abandoned Russian ration packs to the remains of weaponry – bear raw, bloodstained witness to the violence enacted there.

The work was made more urgent by Vladimir Putin’s ideological framing of the invasion: the denial that Ukraine has its own distinct identity or historical narrative. Under those circumstances, the Ukrainians’ impulse to collect material and quickly, pragmatically display it in the emptied-out museum asserts that they actually exist; that this actually happened.

It can be hard to connect what can seem like a tame

British museum culture – jolly afternoons among the paintings, a trip to the cafe and shop – with the unvarnished task of memory preservation in Kyiv.

In fact, there is every connection. I think of the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which began in 1917. The first world war was still in full spate, but people based on the western front were asked to collect objects from the battlefield. The museum’s founders were convinced that one day the public would need to gather round the artefacts – again, the actual material evidence of what the country had been through. They were right.

More than a century later, that same museum has just

opened an exhibition about the Troubles. The Ulster Museum has shown the importance of thoughtfully, carefully gathering and displaying the memory of the Troubles for its communities in the heart of Northern Ireland. The IWM is doing something different. It is bringing the world of checkpoints and rubber bullets, of “peace walls” and razor wire to a Britain that barely understood, and largely chose to avert its eyes from, the savage “normality” that the Northern Irish lived through during the most violent periods of the conflict.

That the IWM decided to make this exhibition reminded me of something said at a recent set of conversations among museum directors convened by the charity Art Fund, to mark the shortlist announcement for this year’s museum of the year prize. “We make things visible. That’s what we do,” said Sally Shaw, the director of Colchester’s contemporary art gallery Firstsite. “We put things into the public realm. And we do that with other people; it’s a collaborative effort. So what we have to concentrate on is: what it is that we want to make public? And how do we do it?” Shaw’s statement is almost naive in its simplicity, and yet cuts to its heart. What is to be made public? With whom? How?

There is a growing awareness that museums can no longer offer a singular, lofty, purportedly neutral view. Unless, that is, they are content to be mistrusted by, or understood as irrelevant to, some of the communities around them.

The IWM’s Troubles exhibition addresses some of these issues by including “curator’s notes” – in which Craig Murray, who organised the show, explains his approach. At the same time, the exhibition showcases ordinary people’s voices, in polyphonic disagreement.

It is the sort of practice that makes museums less comfortable places than in the days when they could be relied on to be the slumbrous resting place of a few neolithic tools and medieval coins, and no one openly questioned the presence of, say, the African artefacts. But it does make them more vital – because society needs places where debates about history, identity and culture can be enacted, without violence.

An unintended potential consequence of the museum of the year prize is that, by focusing attention on museums that have, against the odds, achieved success, the real crisis in museums – a sheer lack of cash – is overlooked. It’s a slower death than being looted or bombed. But it’s still a death

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer