The venue typically used by Russia to promote itself at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos has been rebranded as the Russian War Crimes House.
Russia House was used to host events at WEF by Russians for many years. A Ukrainian businessman, working with WEF, has turned the venue into an exhibition depicting the devastation and destruction of the war in Ukraine.
Organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and PinchukArtCentre, an international centre for contemporary art based in Kyiv, “the exhibition aims to inform about the main facts, share faces, names and dates and provide at least some of the victims a platform from which to tell their real story,” the foundation said in a press release.
Björn Geldhof, the exhibition’s curator, told CNN that the process of collecting and verifying the images took about one-and-a-half weeks, collecting more than 4,600 images showing “overwhelming amount of evidence of war crimes.”
“An exhibition as this, is one of the steps to raise awareness for the absolute necessity of bringing war criminals to justice and this is not exclusively the task of Ukraine, this is a common task, this is a task for all countries in the world to say this cannot be,” Geldhof told CNN.
He added that this project is “about people” who have been attacked and killed. “And we need to honor them, we need to give them a voice and we need to give them a face,” he said.
Russian politicians and businessmen were not invited to this year’s World Economic Forum after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“As Russia is not here, we had the opportunity to speak about Russia but about a different reality of Russia, about the war crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine,” Geldhof said adding that “it is incredibly important to show what Russia is really doing in Ukraine which is proactively and consciously targeting civilians, killing, raping civilians in a way to try to exterminate Ukraine as a nation.”
The initiative was supported by the City Council and the World Economic Forum.