Cultural programme

Participants are invited to visit the following parks:
Lower Park
Oranienbaum Park
Alexandria Park

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Catherine Palace represents Russian artistic culture of the 18–20th centuries and is a true masterpiece of Russian Baroque. The Grand Hall and the Golden Enfilade of state halls, including the world-famous Amber Room, are stunningly luxurious.
The museum’s exhibition covers over 300 years of its history and the restoration efforts after the Great Patriotic War.

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Once there are no more free places for Forum participants and registration closes in the personal web office, you can buy a ticket on your own at face value.

The exhibition is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of Konstantin Bogaevsky (1872–1943), one of the greatest representatives of the Silver Age of Russian culture. A student of Ivan Aivazovsky, Ivan Shishkin and Arkhip Kuindzhi, Bogayevsky graduated from the Academy of Arts in 1897 and entered professional life at a crucial time in the history of Russian art. Konstantin Bogaevsky shared the ideas of symbolism, as evidenced by his early canvases “The Old Crimea” (1902), “The Desert. A Fairy Tale” (1903), and “After the Rain. Sea Coast” (1903).
Around 50 paintings, watercolours, drawings and lithographs by Konstantin Bogaevsky from the collections of the Russian Museum and KGallery will be on show.

City showcase event
Access with participant badge (by prior registration in personal web office; seats are limited)
Once there are no more free places for Forum participants and registration closes in the personal web office, you can buy a ticket on your own at face value.

City showcase event
Access with participant badge (by prior registration in personal web office; seats are limited)
Once there are no more free places for Forum participants and registration closes in the personal web office, you can buy a ticket on your own at face value.

About 100 works at the exhibition share the motifs that characterize the concepts of “home” and “family” (“the family circle”, “children at home”, “peace and tranquillity”, and “at the table”) run through the exhibition, which includes close to 100 artworks from the Russian Museum’s repositories. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to see rarely exhibited artworks by well-known artists like Ivan Kramskoi, Vladimir Makovsky, Illarion Pryanishnikov, Kirill Lemoch, Vasily Maximov, Alexei Korzukhin, Boris Kustodiev, Yury Kugach, and others. This world of intimate domestic images, poignantly communicating the essence of home and hearth, is also populated by works from lesser-known artists. The paintings in the exhibition are accompanied by thematically relevant sculptures, applied and folk artwork, lithographic prints, and photographs.

City showcase event
Access with participant badge (by prior registration in personal web office; seats are limited)
Once there are no more free places for Forum participants and registration closes in the personal web office, you can buy a ticket on your own at face value.

Participants are invited to visit the following exhibitions:

MAXIMum Gorky. Exhibition commemorating the 155th anniversary of Maxim Gorky
The exhibition will tell you about Gorky’s biography through the prism of his social and political activity; the nature of Gorky's influence on Russian and foreign public opinion at that time; his relations with political parties; and his attitude to the political movements of the 20th century.

Donbass: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Exhibition
The exhibition will show the main stages in the history of the Donbass: from the establishment of the Ekaterinoslav Governorate as part of the Russian Empire to a region with great potential in the 20th century. The events of the Great Patriotic War, the reconstruction period, the ‘golden period’ of the region in the 1960–1970s will be presented. The turning point in the exhibition scenario will be the events of 2014 and their consequences for the people of the Donbass.

Politics and Music. Exhibition
The exhibition presents music as part of people’s spiritual life and as an instrument of political agitation and propaganda, a transmitter of new values and ideals. It inspired, taught, led soldiers to victory, educated children, was used by the state for ideological purposes, and fought against its censorship

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The Russian Museum of Ethnography is one of the largest ethnographic museums in the world. It has a collection of about 500 thousand items.

The museum displays unique objects of peoples living in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and Central Asia. It preserves cultural artefacts of 157 peoples of Russia and neighbouring countries.
The Russian Museum of Ethnography is housed in a building constructed in the style of Russian neoclassicism. The gem of the building is the Marble Hall. It was conceived as a memorial hall in honour of Emperor Alexander III. The peculiarity of this monumental structure, with an area of about 1,000 square metres, is the use of only Russian pink marble for decoration. Along the perimeter of the Marble Hall there is a high relief frieze depicting representatives of various peoples of the Russian Empire. Sculptors have placed numerous figures on it, forming genre scenes from the lives of multiple peoples of the Russian Empire, creating a collective image of Russia and emphasizing the idea of ethnic diversity, richness and variety of the cultures of the peoples inhabiting it.

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The State Museum of the History of Religion is the only museum in Russia and one of the few in the world to focus on the emergence and development of religion. The museum has about 200,000 exhibits, with the oldest dating back to the 6th millennium B.C. These are historical and cultural artefacts of different countries, eras and peoples – from Archaic Greece, Ancient Egypt, Israel and Mesopotamia to the early European Middle Ages; from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Modern Age, as well as artefacts of Buddhism and Islam.

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Participants are invited to visit the following exhibitions:

Russian Theatre. Photography of the 19–20th centuries
This exhibition project introduces the viewer to Russian theatre photography of the last third of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Portraits of artists, scenes from productions, theatre buildings and their interiors, and set design workshops reflect the rich theatrical life in Russia.
More than 150 original historical photographs from the collections of ROSPHOTO, the Bakhrushin Museum, and the Museum of Theatre and Musical Art in St Petersburg will be on display.

Earth and Sky. Viktor Ilyin
This retrospective exhibition of Viktor Ilyin, a classic of Russian photography, presents his works from more than forty years of professional activity. All of Ilyin’s photographs – be they landscapes or portraits – are characterized by a precise composition, extreme conciseness, and a black and white scale.
This outward austerity and detachment reveal a sense of concentrated time and the author's deeply philosophical view of the world.


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On the dates of the Forum, the Bolshoi Saint Petersburg Circus will host the tour of the Great Moscow Circus. The programme by Edgar and Askold Zapashny entitled the ‘Terrible Power’ includes incredible adventures, grandiose sets and video installations, light, laser and pyrotechnic special effects, exclusive costumes, amazing animals, and highly professional artists.


City showcase event
Access with participant badge (by prior registration in personal web office; seats are limited)
Once there are no more free places for Forum participants and registration closes in the personal web office, you can buy a ticket on your own at face value.