The Palace of Arts in Minsk

The Palace of Arts in Minsk is not just a massive building in the city centre, but it is a manifestation of cultural life of the capital residents and the whole country. Art exhibitions, fairs, sales, holiday activities and even the Belarusian week of fashion are held regularly here. Each large city needs such a place.

Three-stored building of the Palace belongs to the “Belarusian union of painters”. The leadership of the Union received a letter as of 22 February 2011 with an offer to make this building the ownership of Minsk city for reconstruction. It was supposed to be passed free of charge. Nowadays art exhibitions and performances are still held in the Palace. The director of the Palace is Aleksander Zinkevich, who was the graduate of Belarusian Academy of Arts. Aleksander does his best to increase the amount of visitors, offers innovations, looks for investors and is in charge of administrative affairs, as the building is still in need of reconstruction and creative ideas’ realization. The world moves forward, and the leadership of the Palace tries to keep up with the times.

The area of the building allows to hold really large exhibitions, and modern technologies help to transform the space depending on an event purpose. So, sizable pieces were installed not once under the dome of the Palace, and the most extraordinary art projects were realized with the help of the professionals. So, opened in October 2016 exhibition “Autumn gallery” was given  a varied, but quite positive feedback, that’s a completely normal reaction to modern art pieces.

The well-known building in the city centre, opened in 1973, although doesn’t operate at its maximum, but rarely stands empty. People generally come to the Palace of Arts to look at the paintings, to visit creative exhibitions, to buy exotic oriental pieces of jewellery, useful products and so on. Especially, it is necessary to single out “Belarus Fashion Week”, that takes place here only since 2010 and makes it possible for domestic designers to show themselves, that is undoubtedly becomes a huge input to the development of modern cultural life of Belarus and allows the youth to achieve a new level concerning fashion and style. Such an experience makes it possible to develop its personnel in fashion industry and not to be guided by the other countries. Although, foreign fashion icons presenting at the event help to adopt experience and send no so much experienced but no less talented Belarusian designers in the right direction. All of the fashion week guests admitted the high level of this event in Belarus.

The Palace of Arts is a building of socialist epoch, including the vestiges of the past, architectural traditions and contemporary aspects of Belarusian people lives. The amount of visitors is surely to grow, as nobody knows for sure what art is, even those who create it, but everyone is interested in it. Anyway, this place is worthwhile visiting.