Open Kurbas: Digital Collection is a project of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine to digitize 12,000 museum objects and create a bilingual (Ukrainian and English) website with open access to a collection of memorabilia related to the renowned 20th century director Les Kurbas.
Started in 2021, the project will open the museum collection to the world and make Les Kurbas’s work accessible to all.
#КурбасДляВсіх (#KurbasForAll) is the slogan of the project Open Kurbas: Digital Collection.
The idea for the project arose from research into the history of the museum in general and the Berezil Artistic Association in particular. Vasyl Vasylko, founder of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema, saw the museum as an innovative laboratory that anyone can use for their professional development, especially theater directors, actors and set designers. The museum was to become a place to shape a refined theater audience, one that could grasp complex avant-garde works.
Digital collections and the digitization of museums are global trend demanded by our times. We created the project Open Kurbas: Digital Collection by combining the idea of a museum laboratory with the digitization of the Berezil collection, and we’re certain that the avant-garde museum staff would have been satisfied to learn about our approach to implementing their ideas.
The digitized items include: photographs, negatives, costumes, manuscripts, documents, posters, set models, costume sketches, set designs, materials from the archives of the Young Theater, Kyiv Drama Theater (Kyidramte), Berezil Artistic Association and Theater, and individuals from the museum collection. You can search the collection by category (performances, theaters, people, dates) or keywords.
The rarest items in the collection are on glass negatives. Exclusive shots from performances and portraits of Kurbas and other members of Berezil were found during the digitization.
Openkurbas.org:
- An open online platform about the life and work of Les Kurbas
- More than 6,000 digitized museum objects from the collection of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine and books from Les Kurbas’s personal library
- Articles by researchers, theater critics, art critics and culturologists
- 10 video lectures about the life and work of Les Kurbas, his milieu, interests and experiments, artistic and ideological views
- 6 videos about the digitization of the museum collections for the project Open Kurbas: Digital Collection
The project manager is Iryna Drobot
The curator of the project is Tetyana Rudenko
Project team:
Olena Stadnik, Iryna Stepenko, Alina Dyachenko, Olga Semkanych, Victoria Pashchenko, Iryna Meleshkina, Iryna Zubchenko, Halyna Protsevyat, Anastasia Kanivets, Olena Leshchenko, Tetyana Boyko, Yana Partola
Designer – Lera Guevska
Project consultants – Sergiy Rudenko, Anna Veselovska
The museum objects were digitized by the “Digital Country” company.