Primary Forms (2023-2024)

The 2024/2025 school year is a special one for the Primary Forms program. Until now, artworks were sent to schools in specially designed toolboxes. There, they were used by children, incorporated into school exhibitions and stage sets, served as teaching tools, or even inspired changes to school regulations. The school became a kind of museum. Now, the direction is reversed – both the children’s artworks and the children themselves are coming to the big box that is the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The museum becomes a school.

The main theme of Primary Forms in the 2024/2025 school year is the museum as an institution. In what ways is a museum like a school? Can a school be de-museumified, and a museum de-schooled? Who decides what is and isn't art? How can one recognize the “museum value” of objects? Who really owns art? What is art for – and whom does it serve?

This year’s museum edition of Primary Forms will introduce three new instruction-works, created for schools, museum audiences, and people working in art institutions.

The first is by Uruguayan-German conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer, who explores the topic of education and the “de-schooling” of the art academy. The second is by Kateřina Šedá, a Czech artist known for her collaborations with communities, often involving her own family or neighbors in her projects. The third is by Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the key figures of so-called relational aesthetics, who organizes communal cooking, music-making, and learning in museum spaces.

Luis Cammnitzer
„MUSEUM QUALITY”

Luis Camnitzer is an artist and an art theorist, educator and critic who is engaged in the links between art and education. Camnitzer often uses text to encourage action and reflection. The set of instructions Museum Quality may be used as an exercise or as a point of departure for a discussion. It can be used to imagine two different models of the museum: one that is resistant to change and governed by a rigid set of rules, and the open museum, where processes and joint activity are key.

Kateřina Šedá  
“SCHOOL SPIRIT”

Kateřina Šedá is an artist who engages in her projects family members, neighbors, and people who have never been to a museum. The set of instructions School Spirit encourages the users to evoke the spirit of the building. The spirit of a place is composed of the function of the space, the temperature, the presence of people, the scent, colors, light. Šedá encourages responses to the questions: Can you draw a sound or a smell? Can you draw an emotion that is found deep in our hearts? How to set a “trap” to capture a spirit?

Rirkrit Tiravanija
“Just smile and don’t talk” 

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work is based on doing different things together, shifting our focus in the museum from objects to relations and situations. His works are reminiscent of a culinary recipe (indeed he is an avid cook himself). Tiravanija’s brief instruction—“just smile and don’t talk”—can be treated like advice for life, a joke, or a simple exercise in mindfulness and patience.