The exhibition “City within a city. The story of Kreenholm”, will be opened on 12 May 2024, and it introduces the history of Kreenholm with the help of models by Fyodor Shantsyn is done in honor of the 167th birthday of Kreenholm manufactory.
The Kreenholm manufactory, founded in 1857, became one of the largest textile companies not only in the Russian Empire, but in all of Europe in just a few decades. A settlement of workers began to form around the factory buildings, which over time developed into an entire industrial town. Thanks to Fyodor Shantsyn’s models, we can get an idea of how this area originally looked like, 80 years ago.
The idea of creating the Kreenholm model came to Fyodor Shantsyn while he was working on the famous Vana Narva model. Fyodor next tackled Kreenholm, because a large amount of historical visual material has been preserved about it. The Kreenholm model began in 2017, when the master created a copy of the Kreenholm Hospital, which was built according to the project of the architect and artist Aleksandr Wladovsky in 1913. Currently, Fyodor has completed 45 large and small objects. In the future, he also plans to make the factory buildings.
The exhibition also exhibits Deniss Girenko’s installation about the history of the house, Artjom Bassovski’s sound installation “What did the house hear?” and the timeline created by Maria Kopõtova in the lobby of the building.
Model author: Fyodor Šantsõn
Artist-designer: Jekaterina Poltavets (Katline Graphic Design)
Exhibition team: Johanna Rannula, Denis Yatsenko, Gleb Kuznetsov, Marika Šarova
Executors: Aleksei Kalachov (MTÜ KLÖST) and Alexander Popov (Nuthill OÜ)
Thanks: Narva Museum team, Maria Kopytova, Deniss Girenko, Aleksei Ivanov, Maria Železnova, Arina Jegorova, Olga Clark and everyone interviewed.
The models are temporarily borrowed from the Narva Museum collections.
The project was supported by the Estonian Culture Capital.