The Museum of Modern Art Warsaw Reopens to a New Era

Located in the middle of Warsaw, the new building of the Museum of Modern Art (MSN Warsaw), designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, is the latest and most significant addition to the Polish capital’s cultural and urban landscape. Located in the vast Parade Square – flanked at one end by a central shopping boulevard and, on the other, by the massive Palace of Culture and Science – the museum’s design, a literal white cube, carries potent symbolism. Unlike the ornate and hulking socialist-realist Palace, which upon its completion in 1955 was the eighth tallest building in the world, MSN Warsaw is the architectural equivalent of a clean slate.

The need for a fresh start in Poland has been well documented in this magazine and elsewhere. For the eight years that the far-right Law and Order Party were in power until 2023, foundations and museums had to adhere to conservative ideals to retain state funding, avoiding feminist, ecological and queer issues in the hopes of flying under the political radar. They were right to be afraid: directors of major cultural institutions – including the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź – were replaced with ideological functionaries after their contracts ran out, generating an environment of fear and self-censorship amongst artists and professionals. But now, with a centrist liberal coalition back at the helm, many of the Law and Order Party’s decisions are being reversed and a sense of cautious optimism is gradually returning to the cultural sector.

Early signs, at least, are good. At last week’s press launch of MSN Warsaw, the city’s mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, told a room packed with international journalists that ‘there will be no place for censorship’ in the museum, promising that ‘it is possible to change and reverse historical narratives.’ The reality, though, is that there was not much to censor, with just nine artworks currently on view across the building’s almost 200,000 square metres of exhibition space. Of the pieces on display, large installations seem to have been chosen to highlight the architecture, rather than the other way around. The thick, bloodlike strings of Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Menstrual (2006/24), for instance, emphasize the building’s tall ceilings, as does Sandra Mujinga’s Ghosting (2019). Made from crude, matte-red plastic sheets that contest their sterile environment, the vast sculpture resembles a floating refugee tent: home and shelter ungrounded. Given the kinds of practitioners who were celebrated during the Law and Order years – political provocateurs disguised as artists who ‘tell it like it is’ – the fact that all the artists shown were women felt pointed.

Given the sense of emptiness permeating the museum, the prevailing mood at the opening was one of enduring anticipation. Piotr Drewko of Galeria Wschód told me he regarded the space as serving just as beneficial a purpose as a gathering place for like-minded people as an exhibition venue. Maybe, after a decade of artistic provocations, a space free from ‘tension or shouting’, to quote Drewko, is precisely what Warsaw needs. Joanna Mytkowska, the museum’s director since 2007, certainly thinks so. In a recent interview with Warsaw Observatory of Culture, she said that she does not ‘see the museum as a propaganda tool where the audience would be shown the “right direction”’.

What exactly her vision is for MSN Warsaw will become clearer in February, when the galleries dedicated to the permanent collection – approximately 1,000 works acquired over the last two decades – open to the public, along with the first temporary exhibition drawn from that collection. But, with all this talk about the fresh start that the museum will bring to the city, it’s hard not to think about the massive archaeological site that is situated right next door, where bulldozers are currently excavating the remains of old tenement buildings destroyed by World War II – a clear reminder, if one were needed, that Warsaw’s incomplete future is bound to a past that cannot be forgotten. 

The opening program of the new building of the MSN Warsaw is on view until 10 November.

^{Main image: Museum of Modern Art (MSN Warsaw) building (detail), 2024. Photograph: Marta Ejsmont}