LETTER TO THE PUBLIC

September 2026

 

Dear Visitors!

 

This October will mark two years since we first invited you to the new MSN downtown, at Marszałkowska 103. These have been intense, and you’ve been visiting in great numbers—more than 1.3 million visits have been documented, effectively including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw among Europe’s most important art institutions for contemporary culture.

 

During the grand opening, you stepped inside an almost empty building as we began by sharing its architecture and functions with you. Then, as an introduction to all further interactions, we turned the entire space into an exhibition of collected works that have defined art since the beginning of the 21st century. And around a year ago, we launched our regular program.

 

It started with the Kyiv Biennial exhibition titled Near East, Far West, a geopolitical examination of how authoritarianisms spread (including that of Russia) while liberties and democracy shrink. As such, it was a firm declaration of social and political commitment on the part of the Museum. The next big exhibition, The Woman Question 1550–2025, was received very well, attracting 150,000 viewers. Curated by Alison Gingeras (US), the display brought together more than two hundred works by female artists representing diverse geographies and cultures as well social classes and genres—in a showcase of possibilities created by the new Museum in terms of popularizing art, ensuring its accessibility, and producing narratives that transcend the boundaries of any single artistic discipline. Concurrently, The City of Women opened, engaging in dialog with the highly relevant feminist tradition of giving due representation to women’s art.

 

In the year that followed, we presented two monographic exhibitions dedicated to painters who have had a tremendous impact on abstraction: the Polish avant-gardist Maria Jarema and the contemporary American artist Julie Mehretu. Another format that holds a special place in the Museum’s program is that of exhibitions which reinterpret historic phenomena based on new, pioneering research. Such is the exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes: Surrealism and Antifascism, running until January 2027, as it not only features extraordinary Surrealist works from around the world but also revises the very notion of Surrealism—as a genuinely political movement, born of free imaginatories that revolted against fascist violence. Especially popular since its summertime opening, too, has been the monographic exhibition Edward Dwurnik: Pride and Shame, in which the output of the celebrated painter receives a meaningful rereading in the contexts of class unrest in the late Polish People’s Republic and the country’s political transition of the 1990s.

 

In addition to exhibiting, we continue to offer—often following consultations with you, our Visitors—extensive public and performance programs, complemented by film screenings at the CINEMUSEUM as well as educational events for different age groups, in-depth guided tours, smaller studio-sized shows, and collaborative social events.

 

Two years into the existence of our new location, MSN stands for a well-developed institutional exhibition program that relies on thorough research into modern and contemporary art as well as on close collaborations with artists. In this way we’re creating a dynamic map of global artistic tendencies, one you can navigate better as we carry on an open discussion regarding the local political community that emerges through culture.

 

More exhibitions and public projects are already planned for the coming season. In the months ahead, the medium of sculpture will be foregrounded. The exhibition Sculpture Beyond the Solid, scheduled to open in October already, intends to show how languages of sculpture are changing these days in reaction to the uncertainties and tensions of modern life. Before that, in September still, we’re unveiling two sculptures in the public space. On the terrace inside MSN, which hasn’t been used for displays so far, a series of artistic interventions—able to be seen from street level too—begins with Dominika Olszowy’s Sand Fountain, a monument dealing with climate crisis melancholy. And on Central Square, next to the Museum’s façade, an almost five-meter-high sculpture titled Die Doppelgängerin is being erected by Valie Export, an Austrian artist connected with the feminist scene. The latter takes the form of twin pairs of scissors cast in bronze, oversized in the spirit of pop art and referencing the act of cutting one’s ties with the past. Symbolizing new beginnings—in social life, in art, and on the Square itself—it officially inaugurates that location for MSN’s public projects. The Museum’s surroundings will also host the events of the eighteenth edition of WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION. The festival, revolving around Warsaw’s food sovereignty this year and accordingly themed Sovereign and well-fed, will culminate in a local produce market taking place in front of MSN.

 

We are also preparing for new challenges going forward. Most important to us is the extending of MSN’s collection, pursued in order for it to illustrate that crucial point at which artistic activity intensified. The collection is meant to show artists’ social commitment in Warsaw, and in the country at large, demonstrating at the same time the new geography of artistic relations and redefining the role of Eastern European art in the wider world. To build a collection is a process that takes time, and reflecting on it will be the early 2027 presentation at MSN developed in collaboration with Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia—one of Europe’s leading museums of contemporary art, whose collection began symbolically with Picasso’s Guernica and now focuses on different varieties of socially committed art. Together we want to discuss today’s local canons, their transformations as well as significance as sources of cultural communality; and we want to show our collection elsewhere, at other institutions, so that Warsaw’s local character confronts that of other visions of the artistic canon. In 2027, MSN’s collection will be on display at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok.

 

All that said, it remains part of the Museum’s ambitions as well to keep retracing the map of contemporary culture—to extend guidance in the ever-changing world of artistic experimentation. Accordingly, the plan for the first half of 2027 also includes the exhibition Panic Realism, in which curator Natalia Sielewicz looks at political art in times when the greatest challenge faced is that of growing post-Trumpist defeatism.

 

We are waiting for you at MSN every week and every weekend. We are always happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Whatever shortcomings are identified, we take care to improve as quickly as possible. We are open to interact and want to have your program expectations in mind; the fastest way for us to meet them is through our public programs.

 

The mission of MSN is to foster artistic interrelationships and produce modern, unifying cultural capital to share. We believe that to thrive, societies need universal things and ideas they could relate to, even if it were for those to only be the subject of criticism. Relating, however, can only happen where there is dialog, debate, or constructive disagreement. This is why we wish to keep seeing you at MSN!