With Youth Palace the Museum Becomes a School of Freedom

A museum can be much more than a place to look at works of art. With Youth Palace, the Rockbund Art Museum is transformed into a living laboratory of experiences inspired by the Children's Palaces of the socialist era, where music, theater, dance, and creative activities were used to educate new generations. Spanning all five floors of the museum, the exhibition brings together installations, newly commissioned works, and projects by numerous international artists. At its core is a four-month program of workshops, gatherings, and participatory activities. Here, visitors are not simply spectators, they are invited to learn, experiment, and even "unlearn," questioning habits and long-held assumptions. Rather than reconstructing an educational model from the past, Youth Palace poses a strikingly contemporary question: can institutions foster autonomy, critical thinking, and collaboration without imposing new models of behavior? Through works exploring identity, power, memory, and collective life, the exhibition turns the museum into a space for dialogue and active participation. Far from the idea of a traditional exhibition, Youth Palace offers an experience to be lived rather than simply observed, where art and learning come together to imagine new forms of community and new ways of engaging with the present.