In 1989, the permanent exhibition ‘Building site No. 501’ opened its doors. Its exhibits were placed in showcases and on turnable posters in a separate hall of 45m 2. They recounted the history of the building of the railway line Chum-Labytnangi-Salekhard-Igarka. The exhibits, mostly photographs and camp items such as lamps, bars, barbed wire, prison cell doors, boxes for storing potatoes, were taken from the Museum’s own collection. In 1991 the exhibition travelled to Toronto (Canada) and, in 1995, to Moscow. In December 1995 the exhibition won a first prize at the international festival ‘Krasnojarsk Museum Biennal’. The exhibition also toured various museums in the Yamalo-Nenetsk autonomous district. In 2002 it was dismantled, and the exhibits returned to the Museum’s collection.
After closing its permanent exhibition the Museum organised several temporary exhibitions, such as the photo exhibition ‘Building site No. 501: Photographs are Speaking’. The exhibition ‘Building site No. 501: Past and Present’ is dedicated to the history of the Kharbeiskoe molybdenite deposit, which was exploited with the help of convict geologists, and to the history of the camp theatre. ‘Building site No. 501: History of a Building Site’ informs about the building of the railway line Chum-Labytnangi-Salekhard-Igarka. The Museum also offers thematic excursions.
An expedition of museum staff and journalists along the ‘Dead Road’ (the unfinished part of the railway line between Salekhard and Igarka) in 1988 laid the foundation of the present collection. The collection ‘Building site No. 501’ now comprises over 800 items (bars, doors, plates and dishes, lamps, bread baking pans, construction tools etc.), as well as 6,500 original and copied documents from central and state archives, including registration cards of prisoners, medical reports and photographs.
Work is under way to establish the Museum Complex ‘Building site No. 501’, which will include fragments of buildings from abandoned camps with all the telltale parts such as bars, doors, windows and drawings on the walls, as well as reconstructed elements of a camp zone, for example a camp fence, watchtowers, penal isolator, canteen, barracks etc. The new Complex is envisaged to provide space for a permanent exhibition, a research and information center, an archive and a library.
