The Rockbund Art Museum is delighted to announce Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making, a major group exhibition that transforms the museum into a provisional Children’s Palace—referencing the socialist extracurricular institutions that, beginning in China in 1953 with the Kadoorie family’s Marble Hall in Shanghai, requisitioned colonial-era estates and redistributed them to the children of workers as sites of music, dance, theatre, and technical training previously reserved for elites.

A state-led pedagogical apparatus common across socialist geographies, Children’s Palaces and their cognates were a product of international revolutionary educational theories that arose in the early 20th century. Through an invocation of what remains unfinished and unresolved in the Children’s Palace as a form, Youth Palace brings into view and questions its claim that aesthetic training, collective discipline, and organized after-school life could constitute a practice of freedom, and the failures that this claim produced.

Within the interior logics of Youth Palace, the concept of youth does not refer to biological age or status, but, as described by curator X Zhu-Nowell, “a radical figure and a methodology, a state of unmoored political subjectivity always on the cusp of becoming” that “(de)constructs the ossified structures of history and returns them to a process and a context.”

Unfolding across the entire museum, Youth Palace brings together new commissions, reconfigurations of existing works, and a re-adaptation of a project originally presented at the Hanoi Children’s Palace, alongside a four-month curriculum of artist-led workshops, sessions, and gatherings that makes the museum an active site of training, retraining, and de-training.

On the fourth floor, works by Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian and Korean filmmaker and artist Jeamin Cha situate play as a crucial choreographic register for understanding a body politics of alterity.