Exhibition on the historic area of Great Liman in Novi Sad, European Capital of Culture in 2021

Exhibition 'Great Liman: Narratives of inherited area'
Exhibition 'Great Liman: Narratives of inherited area' Image: Predrag Uzelac

Since 4 September 2020, the exhibition ‘Great Liman: Narratives of inherited area’ shows the narratives of the historic area of Great Liman in Novi Sad, which during the previous century was shaped and transformed by various activities, starting from classical industry, through manufacturing and artistic production, to cultural and creative industries.

In the early 1920s, in the area of Great Liman, along the Danube, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Trade built a warehouse, which generated the formation of a new city industrial area. Soon, numerous factories were built on the former swampy ground, primarily for processing metal, wood and stone, but also large warehouses, such as the State Monopoly.

The exhibition shows the industrial past of the area of Great Liman through written and pictorial archives, printed literature, photo-documentation and oral sources, focusing on the tangible and intangible heritage of the Kramer brothers factory, i.e. Petar Drapšin, which undoubtedly determined the identity of this area.

After the relocation of the Petar Drapšin factory, the area of Great Liman began to be occupied mostly by craftsmen, as well as by youth associations and artists, who revived the abandoned factory complexes. In this period, the inherited buildings, although already ruined, were transformed into workshops of various crafts, art studios and gathering places for young people, as evidenced by the artistic photographs.

After the reconstruction of the infrastructure and putting into function certain objects of rich history, this segment of the historic area of Great Liman will become a kind of creative district and the epicentre of the cultural production of Novi Sad.

The exhibition visualizes organic changes in the purpose of historical buildings in a unique way, from their construction to what they are currently being transformed into.

The exhibition is organised by:
Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture 2021 as a part of Kaleidoscope of Culture, one of the biggest programmes within the Novi Sad European Capital of Culture 2021 project

The curators of the exhibition are:
Anica Draganić, associate professor in the field of history of architecture and preservation of architectural heritage at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad.
Mária Szilágyi, architectural historian and conservator, employed as an assistant with a doctorate at the Department of Architecture and urbanism of the Faculty of Technical Sciences.

The author of the photographs is:
Predrag Uzelac

Source: press release.

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