Culture Under Attack, Imperial War Museum, London

When I heard that the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London was holding three linked exhibitions, under the collective title of Culture Under Attack, on how conflict threatens people’s cultural inheritance, I was determined to go and see them. 

It is a subject that has always been close to my heart. I grew up as the son of a Polish pianist and musicologist who was a refugee from communist Poland and had fought the Nazis 75 years ago as part of the Polish Home Army in 1944 during the Warsaw uprising. My father survived a concentration camp and arrived in Britain in 1947 with nothing. His country and the fabric of its culture had been deliberately and systematically shattered. 

I was brought up with stories of how the Nazis had tried to extinguish Polish culture and identity during the occupation between 1939 and 1945 – indeed, my father’s identity card stated that he had been born in Germany, not Poland. To give you a little background, the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin’s music was forbidden, art was looted and in 1944 Hitler’s instructions were to destroy Warsaw. The city lost more people in 60 days than Britain did during the entire second world war.

Hitler wanted to decimate the city because it represented the heart of Poland as a distinct culture and identity. As a result, the reconstruction of Warsaw after the war was not just about rebuilding a city, it was about reclaiming an identity that a regime had tried to extinguish. Culture Under Attack tackles this harrowing – and sadly contemporary – subject head-on. These shows moved, inspired and shocked me in equal measure. 

People go out of their way to protect culture in wartime, but they also go to great lengths to attack it. Two of the three shows interrogate these viewpoints – Art in Exile and What Remains. On entering What Remains, visitors are greeted with a quote from Omara Khan Massoudi, the director of the National Museum of Afghanistan: “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.” 

Seeing that quote reminded me of all the work undertaken in Basra, Iraq, over the past 10 years by small groups of British soldiers and curators from the British Museum in support of the dedicated Iraqi museum curators who have been working to redisplay the Basrah Museum. The venue holds Babylonian and Mesopotamian antiquities and is now open in the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s former palace. 

I served in Iraq as a soldier in 2008 and there was a realisation then, even as the British Army prepared to leave the country, that working over the long term with Iraqi friends to build a new museum for their ancient culture would be remembered long after the scars of conflict had healed. What Remains broaches this topic of restoring cultural heritage after a conflict beautifully using the examples of Coventry and Dresden, and the different paths to cultural reconstruction taken by the two cities after the second world war. 

What Remains also pays tribute to the young curators and technical entrepreneurs using 3D techniques to virtually reconstruct objects destroyed by Islamic State (Isis) in Syria and Iraq. It is inspiring and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The story of how our national museums protected cultural treasures during the dark days of 1940 is brilliantly told in another of the three shows, Art in Exile. This exhibition uses archives, objects and paintings to lead visitors through the four categories of items that were evacuated to country houses from the IWM in 1940. 

Bravely, Art in Exile suggests that today’s political attitudes and artistic tastes would change the decisions on which art to save were the same evacuation to be undertaken today. There is also a short film on how London’s National Gallery evacuated its collection to slate mines in Wales. It reminds us of the fact that every month a masterpiece was displayed in the National Gallery, despite the threat of bombs, to maintain public morale. Those paintings and accompanying concerts attracted visitors in numbers that many exhibitions today would be happy with. 

Culture really does matter and when it is threatened, communities take action. The effort we took to protect our cultural heritage only 80 years ago is a source of quiet pride. The history of British and American commitment to protecting culture in conflict is covered well and What Remains invites visitors to look back at the allied teams that worked tirelessly to protect the cultural treasures of western civilisation as armies fought to liberate Italy and north-west Europe. 

It is inspiring to see how this legacy lives on in the British and other western armies, with small units dedicated to preserving cultural heritage in conflict. There is an excellent interview with a British Army reservist captain, who is also an archaeologist with Historic England and a member of the British Army’s cultural protection unit. He explains how today’s soldiers are trained on the importance of protecting sites of cultural importance during military operations. 

Conversely, What Remains also looks at the greed of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, as he looted thousands of art treasures from countries occupied by the Nazis during the second world war. Archive material, photographs and objects bring to light the scale of his theft. The curatorship of this display is fantastic – there’s enough detail without it being overwhelming. The presence of Göring’s white Reichsmarschall dress jacket is particularly chilling.

Contemporary connections 

But perhaps the most unnerving displays in What Remains are those that focus on the destruction of pre-Islamic cultural heritage by Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Iraq and North Africa. The video footage of the smashing of ancient Babylonian statues in the Museum in Mosul, Iraq, by Isis and the blowing up of the Banyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban are harrowing. 

Again, this is contrasted with the international community’s determination to bring to justice the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity. We are reminded of the remorse of the lead perpetrator of the destruction of the treasures of Timbuktu by Islamic fundamentalists in 2012 when confronted with his crimes at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2016.

In the third exhibition of the series, Rebel Sounds, which explores the significance of music in relation to cultural and personal identity, it was a welcome surprise to see my father’s stories in multicolour and relevant still today. It is a reminder that communities come together through music and words. My father told me stories that playing Chopin during the Warsaw uprising when the Nazis were trying to erase Polish culture was particularly important to maintain the morale of the Home Army soldiers. 

This exhibition really shows that the bedrock of our musical culture so often comes from troubled times and is relied on by communities in times of conflict and existential struggle. Perhaps without these struggles, the variations of the songs we hear today would be less colourful and meaningful. 

All three shows juxtapose stories from across the world and from many conflicts, allowing visitors to experience and reflect on the subject matter through their own lens. I got a powerful sense in all the exhibitions that they were being experienced by a diverse group of visitors, all coming at the subject matter from a variety of angles. 

I visited Poland recently and saw the faithful reconstruction of the old town of Gdansk in Poland and the castle in Malbork, and the energy that is being invested in museums. It made me reflect that although culture is often attacked in war, communities go to extraordinary lengths to reclaim and rebuild it. Culture Under Attack reminded me that we are fortunate to work in a sector that preserves our cultural inheritance, which forms our deep roots in identity and sense of belonging. 

In creating Culture Under Attack, we faced challenges both spatially and conceptually – we needed to make visitors curious and show them what was on offer before they engaged with the three exhibitions.

To help address this, we designed a central split-flap installation for the balcony space between the exhibitions, which serves as an introduction to the season and its subject matter, as well as a visual link to the season’s marketing campaign.

Culture Under Attack deals with memory and the loss of cultural objects and places. The split-flap board, which is reminiscent of the old schedule boards in train stations, plays on a sense of shared memory and is an acoustic trigger of a time not so long ago. 

Visitors are transfixed by the analogue quality of the rapidly changing letters and gentle whir of the flaps, which we use to ask questions relating to the destruction of place, art and music. We reintroduce these questions as part of digital response rooms at the end of each exhibition, where visitors are invited to agree or disagree.

The success of the split-flap installation lies in the use of analogue sound as an emotional trigger, using old technologies in innovative ways and posing questions to get visitors mentally prepared for the material they are about to see.