I del 1 av åpningssesjonen under Museumsmøtet i Kirkenes har vi invitert tre innledere som skal snakke om årets tematikk med et internasjonalt perspektiv:
Siân Jones, Professor of Heritage, University of Stirling, UK: Care for Cultural Heritage in War
In war, the values and meanings of heritage are activated in complex and often conflicting ways. Museum collections and heritage sites become subject to both collateral damage and wilful destruction, whilst simultaneously used as unifying, symbolic markers of survival and cohesion. This paper will discuss findings of the DECOPE project, which investigates how care is mobilised for cultural heritage, and those associated with it, in the context of the war in Ukraine. It will examine when and how transnational interventions framed as protection, rescue and care reach museums and heritage organisations on the ground. Frequently, international networks and resources associated with care and rescue target national collections and heritage sites. However, ‘everyday heritage’ projects, aimed at recording and caring for ordinary objects, places and practices, have a particular potency in the Ukrainian response. Many of these projects also involve local and regional museums working with new objects, documents and stories that capture and commemorate local experiences of destruction, resistance and everyday life during war. The paper will identify the practical and financial challenges faced by museum and heritage workers and make recommendations on how this important work can be better supported.
Bio: Siân Jones is Professor of Heritage and Director of the Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy at the University of Stirling. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in cultural heritage and the role of the past in the production of power, identity, and sense of place. Recent projects focus on conservation practice, authenticity, replicas and reconstructions, social value and community heritage. Her latest book, The Object of Conservation (2022, with T. Yarrow), is an ethnographic account of professional practice in a national heritage organisation. She is co-author with Diána Vonnák, Josephine Rasmussen Munch and Sam Hardy of a research and policy report, Mobilising Care for Cultural Heritage in Russia’s War on Ukraine (2025).
Dušan Buran, former senior curator at the Slovak National Gallery: The Case of the Slovak National Gallery
In August 2024, the Slovak Minister of Culture dismissed several directors-general of the country’s leading cultural institutions. After several failed attempts at negotiation, more than 100 employees of the Slovak National Gallery resigned in March 2025.
The lecture outlines the basic motives behind this decision and its consequences. The lecture also presents the main features of the Slovak National Gallery which opened in 2022 after 21 years of renovation and reconstruction.
Whether the paralysis of Slovak cultural institutions is merely an exception or a harbinger of cultural policy developments in other Central European countries remains to be seen.
Bio: Graduated from the Philosophical Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava (1992, M.A.) and the Technische Universität Berlin (2000, Dr. phil.). From 2001 he was the curator of the Gothic Art Collection in the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), since 2005 Head Curator of the Old Masters Collections (Senior Curator). He has published numerous studies on the history of book illumination, medieval sculpture and panel painting at home and abroad.
In 2013 – 2018, Dušan Buran was the Chairman of the National Committee of ICOM Slovakia; 2021 – 2025 the Chairman of the Board of the Slovak Art Council. Since October 2025 he works as a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.
Selection of published books, catalogues and papers: https://sav-sk.academia.edu/DusanBuran
Nils Anfinset, professor i arkeologi og prodekan, Universitetsmuseet, Universitetet i Bergen: Under pressure – culture heritage in Gaza and the West Bank
Bio: Nils Anfinset is a professor of archaeology and vice dean at the University Museum, University of Bergen. He has worked with ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork in Nepal and has a doctorate from the University of Bergen based on excavations in Jericho. Anfinset has been a researcher and lecturer at Birzeit University and has been involved in research collaboration with the Palestinian authorities since 1997. He has experience from Tanzania, Syria, Palestine, Austria, and Norway, among other places, and has also taught for many years at the University of Bergen, as well as at the University of Oslo and Innsbruck University. Anfinset has been a member and chair of the National Committee for Research on Human Remains, and a member of the Member of the Cultural Environment Legislation Committee, which submitted a White Paper to the government based on a comprehensive review of current legislation and drafted proposals for a new cultural environment law.
