The Museum Between the Square and the Palace

Since 2009 the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has held the annual festival Warsaw Under Construction, an exhibition plus numerous events devoted to urban planning. The idea for the festival was drawn from the need to understand the changes underway in the capital, and from the intuition that public space can be improved. This year the theme of the festival is the history of the center of Warsaw, where the museum’s own building stands, and along with it, the history of the museum itself, which is inextricably intertwined with this site. After two decades of functioning in temporary headquarters, MSN Warsaw is moving to Plac Defilad. A key context for the works shown in the festival exhibition is the historic post-communist transformation, which has driven changes throughout the city. The long birthing process of the institution—as the once-nomadic museum has settled permanently in the center of Warsaw is marked by the complex relationship between the building and its site. Construction of the New Center of Warsaw is far advanced, and promises to make the public space of the capital more friendly, convenient and comfortable for all users.

In the early 1950s, the ruins of the dense 19th-century structures here were cleared away, and the urban plan for the site was laid out with the Palace of Culture and Science as the dominant feature. In front of the entrance to the Palace of Culture is one of the biggest squares in Europe—Plac Defilad (Parade Square), with an area of 4.4 hectares. The square has been filled with people only twice: during a speech by communist leader Władysław Gomułka in 1956, and during a mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II in 1987. While the square has not changed as radically as some other areas of Warsaw, it has never stood empty. Since 1989 it has hosted festivals, benefit concerts of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity, and the Warsaw Book Fair. Grassroots and ephemeral structures have been erected here to “domesticate the square”: provisional bus stations, street-food stands, vendors’ stalls, and the KDT market hall.Dismantling of the KDT hall, to make way for a link to the second metro line and the planned construction of the new MSN Warsaw building, sparked a strike and occupation of the market hall in 2008, which turned into riots. In short, the space of Plac Defilad embodies the city’s recent history.

There are many reasons for focusing on changes to the very center of Warsaw. The threat of doubling of metropolitan areas over the next 25 years—it is projected that in 2050 there will be 6.5 billion people living in cities—forces us to have a global debate over the growth of urbanism. We also pose this question in the local context: How to develop the central Śródmieście district universally, while remembering about smaller neighborhood centers and the diverse and changing needs of society? What architectural features will make it accessible for a broader group of users, while ensuring the inclusive memory of Warsaw’s cityscape, which has been aggressively reshaped by the real estate market in recent years? What activities—exhibitions, events, and presentation of the collection—should have a place in the new museum? What functions should the museum building serve in these uncertain times of military threats and climate change?

The exhibition was prepared in cooperation with the curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen of gta exhibitions, the gallery at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, which regularly sends students to Warsaw for study visits. During the research phase of the festival, the curators Fischli and Olsen taught a design studio at Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Cambridge and organized a study trip for the Harvard students to Warsaw. They investigated the charged landscape history of MSN Warsaw’s new home and worked on architectural projects that imagined how the museum could extend its premises by repurposing parts of the neighboring shopping mall Domy Centrum. Models, drawings, printed matter and other outcomes of this architecture studio are displayed in the gallery on the ground floor of the new MSN Warsaw building, along the windows on the east façade, creating an alternative urbanist frontage for ul. Marszałkowska. They present a fantasia of potential exhibitions which MSN Warsaw might carry out in the future in relation to the DT Centrum retail buildings across the street. The students proposed initiatives aimed at the local community, exhibitions engaging museum visitors in jointly setting the institution’s agenda, and other formats enabling the city’s inhabitants to contribute to creating the museum’s program.

Through the art works shown in the festival exhibition, the curators Fischli and Olsen address the way museums act as policy makers, as places of classification and exclusion. But, the artists pose the question, what authority do museums represent, and what sorts of mechanisms do they offer for processing history? In the spirit of this conception, the contributions in the first exhibition in the new building of MSN Warsaw  could be read as a warning against the new museum turning into a “museum/mausoleum”—a monumental tomb. Instead, the museum could be imagined as place for living communication with society via art, a place to learn about and understand the world. 

The exhibition Tough Love was prepared in cooperation with the team from GTA Exhibitions, the gallery at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, which regularly sends students to Warsaw for study visits. But this time the curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen invited cooperation by people from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where they were guest lecturers for one semester. The Harvard students visited Warsaw and prepared designs on the topic of the site where the museum was built—a site freighted with significance. Their conceptions were presented in the form of architectural models and drawings. The mockups are displayed in the gallery on the ground floor of the new MSN Warsaw building, along the windows of the east façade, creating an alternative urbanist frontage for ul. Marszałkowska. They present a fantasia of potential exhibitions relating to the DT Centrum retail buildings across the street, and initiatives which MSN Warsaw could pursue in the future.

The works shown in the festival exhibition also address the modernity in which museums have become creators of public policy, or at least a certain reflection of it. But, the artists ask, what authority do museums represent, and what sorts of mechanisms do they offer for processing the difficult history of the world? In the spirit of this conception, the people creating the first exhibition in the new building of MSN Warsaw warn against the new museum turning into a “museum/mausoleum”—a monumental tomb. Rather, the museum should be a place for living communication with society via art, a place to learn about and understand the world.