The renewal of the permanent exhibition at the KGB Cells Museum will be completed on December 6, 2023.
The curators for the updated exhibition in three rooms, formerly used as prison cells, are the film artist Katrin Sipelgas and the film director and producer Jaak Kilmi. Recently, their collaborative work has been enjoyed by visitors at the Estonian National Museum’s fairy tale exhibition “Once Upon a Time…” The same duo has also collaborated on a multimedia journey titled “Hell on the Baltic Sea,” recounting the Juminda naval battle, at the Estonian Maritime Museum in Lennusadam, and a travelling exhibition titled “Juri Lotman 100,” which has been displayed in the past year at the Estonian National Museum, the Thessaloniki Museum of Art, and UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.
At the KGB Cells Museum, visitors to the renewed permanent exhibition can experience a unique immersive experience. In selected rooms, visitors are subjected to a special sense of presence supported by sounds, video projections, animations, and authentic props. In the interrogation room, visitors sit face to face with an interrogator created by the animator Priit Tender. In another cell, they hear accusations presented under the infamous Article 58, while simultaneously facing the photos of the victims of these charges. The room dedicated to the Gulag prison network allows visitors to experience the feelings preceding the imminent arrest and hear excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and its creation in Estonia, near Tartu.
The renewal of the exhibition was supported by the Heritage Board through the “Museum Accelerator 2023” program.