A 2022 exhibition at UNESCO headquarters in Paris presented more than 200 works by children from over 60 countries to mark the 50th anniversary of the Lidice International Children’s Art Competition.
The competition was founded in memory of the children murdered when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed during the Second World War.
Twenty years of prize-winning images
Curator Veronika Trubačová divided the exhibition into a historical selection reproduced on textile banners and original works from the competition’s 49th edition.
That edition focused on robots and artificial intelligence. Other annual themes had included music, biodiversity, happiness and museums.
The competition regularly received around 20,000 entries from children in 70 to 80 countries, turning a local memorial into a global programme of young artistic participation.
Historical memory brought into the present
The exhibition also marked 80 years since the Lidice atrocity.
French and Czech officials used the opening to draw parallels between the destruction of the village and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Their statements placed the children’s artworks within a contemporary political context rather than treating remembrance as a closed historical ritual.
The works themselves varied widely in subject and geography, but their presence at UNESCO gave the competition a shared institutional frame.
By asking children to respond to changing themes each year, the programme joined commemoration with creative independence. Participants were not required to illustrate Lidice directly for its memory to remain active.
The exhibition showed how a memorial project could survive across generations by supporting new work rather than repeating one fixed image of the past.