Izstāde "Tiesības uz bibliotēku"

The exhibition reveals the culmination year of the event cycle "500 Years of the Latvian Book". It encourages thinking about libraries and reading as cornerstones of a democratic society. The exhibition is simultaneously a figurative, intellectually reflective, and political exhibition that must be seen by everyone who loves books, but even more so by those who do not love them yet.

At its center is the Rīgas pilsētas bibliotēka (1524) – the first public library in Rīga, which emerged five centuries ago during the iconoclasm riots and the majority of whose collection was lost in the Second World War. The story of the Rīgas pilsētas bibliotēka is full of drama and vivid, surprising details. In the exhibition, it is used as an example to invite thought and discussion about changes in society and thinking processes today, emphasizing that the library as a model of the world reflects much broader regularities in both individual and collective efforts to organize, comprehend, and understand the world around us. Literacy, books, and libraries are significant elements also in modeling the vision of the future, and the exhibition uses the history of libraries to ask the question anew: would we want the future to be in the hands of an unreading and uncritically thinking society?