The institution that opened last weekend in a brand-new building in the absolute centre of Warsaw is simultaneously a typical museum of modern art and a very special one. Since its inception in 2005, the Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej has been housed temporarily in various buildings. And while the MSN Warsaw – its abbreviated, international name – has been an active and respected institution over the past two decades, a permanent home has still been twenty years in the making. That in itself is quite mind-blowing. Its inauguration was nothing short of a momentous event, a sentiment confirmed by everyone I spoke to during the opening days. The response was the same every time: Warsaw is buzzing, something special is happening right now.
From the outside, the new building does not really look set to blow many minds. The flat, white concrete building sits along the busy Marszałkowska Street, and at first glance it looks like yet another piece of soberly stringent modernist architecture in the tradition of Bauhaus and friends. On closer inspection, you realise that the façade incorporates floating elements and other details. Even so, this is not a building that tries to compete with the city’s major landmark, the imposing Palace of Culture and Science, which towers above it and can be seen from most of the city. Completed in 1955, the palace was “a gift” to the Polish people from the leader of the Soviet Union Josef Stalin. For the oldest inhabitants of Warsaw, it was mostly an unwelcome gift, while the younger generation seems to have embraced the building. It was also the landmark I looked out for as I approached the city by taxi.
The Palace of Culture, which entered UNESCO’s world heritage list in 2007, must have posed an interesting problem for the American architectural firm Thomas Phifer and Partners while designing the new museum. Some might argue that the white building falls flat on its face before the soaring palace. Yet it is difficult to see how to take up the fight without ending up with kitschy, over-eager architecture of the kind seen in many new museums all over the world. Hence, the new MSN Warsaw actually seems brave in its cool levelheadedness. As it turns out, it proves a good fit for the overarching sense of wisdom and humanitarianism that permeates this institution.
The dense fog that shrouded the city every morning during my visit also delayed our landing at Chopin Airport. So by the time I dashed into the museum, the press conference was well under way in the ground floor “auditorium” – an open, sunken meeting space. As I popped in an earbud to listen to the interpreter translating from Polish to English, the architect was in the process of defending “the white brick,” as some critics of the building call it. “Not everyone needs to agree,” said Thomas Phifer as he argued for the simplicity of the architecture by pointing to the need for neutrality, for letting the art take centre stage.
Questions regarding issues of sustainability and gentrification also hovered in the air. Just as they would anywhere else, I briefly reflected before the city’s mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, took the floor: “New architecture will always prompt emotional responses and lively discussion, and that is all to the good. Here in Warsaw, we don’t want censorship or bans.” The hall burst into spontaneous applause, reminding us that history is always lingering on the edges of any situation here in Warsaw.
Speaking to artists or gallerists from the local scene, you do not have to wait long before stories trickle out about the struggles, both political and bureaucratic, it took to get here. This applies equally to the years of transformation after the fall of communism and to the period from 2015 to 2023 when the populist and nationalist Law and Justice Party was in power. From my first visit to the city in 2016, I vividly remember a group of young people kneeling in a corner of the museum busily making what they called “anti-anti-abortion banners” for protest rallies against stricter abortion laws. Unsurprisingly, the government also had little sympathy for contemporary art.
Before we were treated to a tour of the galleries, there was a short coffee break. Heavy TV cameras swivelled to point at director Joanna Mytkowska and Thomas Phifer, who gave standing interviews. I discovered that the tour would be in Polish. Luckily, I struck up a conversation with a nice young woman from the communications department, who ended up accompanying me on the tour, whispering valuable information in my ear.
While the museum’s exterior may be lacking in obvious landmark status, the stairwell inside has plenty of oomph. Watching the many press people heading up the stairs was a spectacular sight. It does not matter whether you choose the one on the right or the left: everyone ends up at the same point on the next floor. The zigzag sequence is repeated up to the next floor. The scene was rather like a Muybridge film of bodies on stairs, gathering and dispersing, the effect enhanced by the chalk-white architecture. A fine emblem for a museum where, in every sense, the emphasis is on humanity, life, and thought.
When I left Warsaw again a few days later, the peopled stairs had long since become the museum’s visual signature. This is also partly due to the fact that the museum elected to show just nine works from the collection in its opening months. The full selection from the large collection will not be on display until February 2025. In other words, visitors walk through several empty galleries and have plenty of time to sit by the large panoramic windows offering views of the Palace of Culture, which is thus made part of the museum experience. Perhaps this also constitutes a wry gesture of architectural arm-wrestling, one which the many Insta-happy visitors are quick to pass judgement over during the opening days: the “gift” from the colonising powers of days gone by makes for a perfect eye-catching backdrop for selfies.
Opting to show just nine large-scale works, all by women, after waiting twenty years for a permanent building is a radical gesture that speaks volumes about the integrity permeating this institution. I cannot imagine any other flagship building in the art world that would open like that.
It all gets off to a compelling start with Alina Szapocznikow’s bronze sculpture of two men, Friendship (Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship) (1954), which stood in the lobby of the Palace of Culture from 1955 to 1992. Over the years, the sculpture has lost its arms, except for one which cradles one of the figures’ shoulders, asserting the friendship – although some might say that the Soviet man’s arm rests somewhat heavily on the Polish shoulder. The rather amazing Szapocznikow (1926–1973) has by now become an acclaimed figure in European art history, albeit not for this type of work, which is among her few pieces in a Social Realist style.
The sculpture’s inclusion in the new museum tells of changing views of the communist era, a transition from the days when all traces of communist occupation were removed to a present-day need to remember and examine the period critically. I heard several different interpretations, including a queer reading typical of our era, but also one positing that the models might not have been a Pole and a Soviet citizen at all, but a Ukrainian and Georgian man. It is as if different perspectives simply gush forth from the large holes in the bronze where the arms once were. A palpable effect of keenly honed curation.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) is another legend in Polish art history. Her monumental composition in woven wool and sisal hangs from the ceiling like heavy skins – half organism, half rug – trailing onto the white terrazzo floor. Monika Sosnowska’s distorted façade curtain, a kind of Tatlin tower, also hangs from the ceiling and had a striking impact when combined with the stage full of speakers, lamps, cables, and other gear being set up for the opening concert featuring Kim Gordon; it promised a sexy meeting between black steel and noise rock.
International contributions come courtesy of Mariela Scafati (Argentina), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), and Sandra Mujinga (Congo/Norway). The latter two are also represented by sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Perhaps there is a slight over-reliance on such works, although they always look good, of course, and do not disrupt the architecture. At this point in the tour, I found myself almost beginning to yearn for a few nails in the untouched walls.
All the more welcome, then, was Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko’s mural done in transparent pastels. It represents simple, near life-sized human figures holding hands or standing supportively grouped around a reclining body that may be injured or old. Ever since Russia invaded and occupied Ukraine, disaster has lurked in Lysovenko’s painting and is often expressed with existential undertones. Here, the painting spreads across just two of the walls in the otherwise empty room, reinforcing the stripped, dreamlike feel of the work. Favouring poets over warriors, individuals over dehumanisation.
In the days that followed, I repeatedly thought of Lysovenko’s frieze as a kind of credo for MSN Warsaw. At this particular museum, it seems to always be about the people who will fill the spaces. If you say that sort of thing in a Scandinavian museum, everyone will immediately think of bouncy castles or something just for children. But a different mentality is at work here – and a more intellectual tradition too. This is evident, for example, in the museum’s outreach and education programme.
“The Museum is an attitude, not a building,” reads one item on artist Luis Camnitzer’s list of different museum models. I came across it in the education department, which bears the splendid title “The Museum as a School. Primary Forms”: a room full of materials and equipment for teaching children and adults alike, and one where everything is made by artists. Here you will find Laure Prouvost’s instructions for mobiles, Goshka Macuga’s words on rubber stamps for printing poems with, and Alicja Bielawska’s colourful textiles that you can wrap yourself in, use as a flag, or mark out a private space with.
There are many more great questions and fun instructions as simple as they are deceptively sophisticated, testifying to the strong tradition of conceptual and process art that runs through Polish art history. A legacy which the new museum will hopefully help give an even stronger position within the general public awareness of art in Europe. The more than one hundred performance works, dance performances, film screenings, and talks programmed for the museum’s first three opening weeks make for an excellent beginning and are free for everyone.
However, few things will be able to surpass the simultaneously fun and poignantly moving opening night parade arranged by Bambí van Balen and nat skoczylas from the collective Tools for Action. ‘Delegation of Slippery Affairs’ set out from the museum’s former home on the other side of Plac Defilad (Parade Square), an hour before the official inauguration of the new museum – that is, during the period when the old museum had ceased operation and the new one had not yet begun.
Large transparent helium balloons floated above the approximately five hundred participants, many of them clad in festive attire, who walked through the city accompanied by music from portable speakers and signs bearing the message “We are art.” Along the way, the procession would make occasional stops to sing a song or perform a small ritual while the large balloons danced around each other. Judging by the many witches with large gnarly willies between their legs and long fingernails clawing at passers-by, the energy being transferred to the new building was by no means exclusively neat and polite.
Upon the parade’s arrival, the paintings and sculptures carried by the delegation were handed over to a beaming museum director who accepted the new donations to the collection. The parade choir sang Diana Ross’s disco anthem ‘I’m Coming Out’ while the large balloons were pushed through the glass doors, letting all the witchy energy seep into the building.
Meanwhile, the queue around the museum grew longer and longer. Thousands of people waited to enter the new house, testifying to a city ready to receive the gift. More than fifty thousand people reportedly made their way past the museum on the opening weekend, and I cannot help but think that this probably included a sizeable number who might not even have known about the city’s museum of modern art beforehand. Places and buildings have that kind of effect.
Luis Camnitzer is, of course, right. The attitude is more important than the building. But now the Polish capital has both, and everyone knows exactly where to go: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Marszałkowska 103. Right in the heart of Europe.
– Exhibitions on view until November 11, 2024: Preview The MSN Warsaw Collection and The Museum as School. On view until January 5, 2025: The Museum between the Square and the Palace, Warsaw Under Construction 16.
