Philosophical Reflection on Museum Exhibition Practices in the Legitimization of Territorial Seizures

Relevance of the research. The relevance of the research is determined by the need for a critical reassessment of museum space as an instrument of geopolitical domination and the legitimization of violence. Occupation not only changes administrative and territorial boundaries but also violently transforms historical narratives, turning original cultural heritage into a marker of the invader’s political sovereignty.

Problem statement. This study focuses on how occupation regimes employ the technology of the “historical seam”, silencing within exhibition narratives, and the creation of ethnographic ghettos to objectify seized territories and deprive indigenous populations of agency.

Analysis of recent research and publications. The theoretical foundation of the study is based on the intersection of several research fields: decolonial studies, memory studies, crypto-historical analysis, and contemporary critical museology. The works of M. Hrymych, S. Kot, E. Rindzevičiūtė, K. Konksi, and O. Mertelsmann provide the theoretical basis for understanding the mechanisms of colonial marking, restitution, and the reorientation of national institutions under conditions of political unfreedom. In particular, the concepts of the “infrastructure of extraction” and the “historical continuum” are key to describing practices of heritage appropriation.

Research task. The aim of the article is to reveal the ideological and instrumental foundations of museum exhibition practices as a marker of occupiers’ legitimization of territorial seizures, as well as to identify universal mechanisms of the intellectual appropriation of someone else’s past and the de-identification of conquered space.

Main material presentation. The experience of countering colonial pressure in the cultural sphere demonstrates that, for an invader, museum space is not a repository of antiquities but a mechanism for producing new geopolitical meanings. The article analyzes the multi-layered process of transforming a conquered landscape through the technology of the “historical seam”, which turns wartime plunder into a logical stage in the development of a territory. The essence of the “infrastructure of extraction” is revealed, in which a paper catalogue becomes a means of the intellectual subjugation of time. The study examines the activities of the Nazi organization Ahnenerbe in occupied Crimea, where manipulative archaeology was used to construct the racial myth of “Gotenland” and morally justify terror. It also considers the specific features of the Soviet extraction of archetypes of European memory in the Baltic states after 1940 through the ideological segregation of collections and the forced ethnographization of culture. A comparison of these models with contemporary Russian practices in the occupied territories of Ukraine reveals a brutal scheme of de-identification: the total looting of original artefacts, the introduction of mobile multimedia surrogates, and the artificial dilution of the subjugated people’s subjectivity within the concept of a “common cradle”.

Conclusions. Thus, museum representation in the hands of an occupier is a complex, multidimensional process of institutional violence in which geopolitical, ideological, and propagandistic dimensions of historical reformatting are combined, while an artificial visual script serves as a temporary decoration for justifying annexation. Genuine overcoming of the consequences of aggression and the decolonization of memory are inextricably linked with the physical de-occupation of territories, the restitution of cultural property, and the restoration of sovereign control over museum space.