Across town from Maidan Square, in a bustling bar with live music, Lina Romanukha scrolls through her Instagram profile. It\u2019s filled with collages cut from decade-old magazines and sketches drawn over the past three years. Both, she says, help her cope with the experience of war.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When Russian troops advanced on Kyiv in February 2022, she fled to her parents\u2019 house in western Ukraine. Within weeks she returned to the capital, convinced she could be more useful here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now 41, the curator and artist describes nights under drone attacks as \u201cRussian roulette.\u201d At first she went to shelters; now she doesn\u2019t bother. \u201cYou can\u2019t live like that forever. If it comes to my building, it comes,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her answer to that fatalism: culture. Romanukha curated an exhibition that digitizes Ukraine\u2019s monuments \u2014 not only those in Kyiv or Lviv, but also in Crimea, Donbas and other territories now under Russian control.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the halls of Kyiv\u2019s Pechersk Lavra \u2014 the centuries-old monastery that has itself survived wars and sieges \u2014 visitors use virtual reality to step into reconstructions of the ancient Greek city of Chersonesus<\/a> in Sevastopol, wander through the Khan Palace<\/a> in Bakhchysarai, or stand before the Mariupol drama theater where hundreds were killed in 2022<\/a>. Each reconstruction is paired with music by Ukrainian composers: It\u2019s Romanukha\u2019s\u00a0way of insisting culture survives even if the stone and marble do not.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n