Living Legacies, Saving Heritage

What does it mean to protect cultural heritage when war, crisis or disaster threatens its survival? From 25 November 2026 to 25 April 2027, Louvre Abu Dhabi addresses this question with Living Legacies. Protecting Heritage. Building Hope, an exhibition organised with ALIPH - International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage - exploring the work of those operating in some of the world’s most complex environments to protect, restore and safeguard cultural heritage. Founded in Geneva in 2017 at the initiative of France and the United Arab Emirates, following the international conference on endangered heritage held in Abu Dhabi in December 2016, ALIPH is an international fund dedicated to the protection and rehabilitation of heritage threatened by war, climate change and natural disasters. In almost ten years, it has supported around 640 projects in 65 countries, with a total investment of $138 million. The exhibition marks the organisation’s tenth anniversary and brings some of its field experience into the museum. The display brings together objects on loan from a number of international cultural institutions and ALIPH beneficiary partners. Projections and testimonies accompany the exhibits in an immersive, multisensory installation built around the stories of people working to protect and restore cultural heritage. ALIPH’s activities reveal the scale and variety of these interventions. From its first projects to rehabilitate the Mosul Museum and the Mar Behnam Monastery in Iraq, launched in 2018, the organisation has extended its work to numerous countries and emergency situations: from protecting museum collections in Ukraine to interventions following the Beirut port explosion and programmes devoted to heritage threatened by climate change in Africa. Living Legacies thus shifts attention from the idea of heritage simply as an inheritance from the past to the practical conditions that allow it to survive. Objects, sites and monuments are presented alongside testimonies from those working to preserve them, revealing the network of expertise, decisions and interventions behind every work that is saved. The exhibition is curated by Magdalena Ruiz of Louvre Abu Dhabi, Sandra Bialystok and Bastien Varoutsikos of ALIPH, with Amaryllis Maria Georges.