Opening of new building

The inauguration of MSN Warsaw’s new home will be open and inclusive. It will feature over a hundred events between Friday, October 25, and Sunday, November 10.

On October 25, 2024, the Museum of Modern Art in Waraw will open its new home on Plac Defilad. The welcome for the new building—an agenda of events open to all—will last for three weeks and give visitors a preview of future activities at the museum. In addition to an exhibition of selected works from the MSN Warsaw collection, the opening will include performance pieces, social and educational events, concerts, lectures, and the new edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival. The museum’s publishing wing will offer new titles, and the new cinema in the building will show its first screenings, accompanied by an extensive public program.

The opening and first few weeks of operation of MSN Warsaw in its new building will primarily feature the presentation of several large-scale sculptures and installation pieces by Polish and international women artists, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alina Szapocznikow, Sandra Mujinga and Cecilia Vicuña, and opening of the new edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival, titled “The Museum Between the Square and the Palace.”

According to Joanna Mytkowska, director of MSN Warsaw: “We are launching our operations with a show of works by women. In this way we will continue the global trend of catching up on our understanding of forgotten or ignored women artists, covering up these blank spots with patches of color. Thus, for the museum, this portion of our collection gathered over the past 20 years will serve as a manifesto of support for neglected portions of the art scene and a continuation of the search for missing figures from art history. These efforts have resulted for example in the great posthumous blossoming of the popularity of Alina Szapocznikow, whose work Friendship will be seen by our visitors on the opening day. So we are showing both historic works, including a large abakan by Magdalena Abakanowicz, as well as works by contemporary female artists of international importance, such as Sandra Mujinga from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cecilia Vicuña, the Chilean icon of feminist art. The selected works perfectly reflect the context of the site and the long presence of MSN Warsaw on Plac Defilad, addressed in this year’s edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival.”

All the way back in its first edition, the Warsaw Under Construction (WWB) festival examined the context of construction of a new home for MSN Warsaw on Plac Defilad. Over the following years, the curators and invited artists entered in their works into a dialogue with the Palace of Culture and Science and the history of the space surrounding it. They raised such questions as who will regain this urban square, and whether it will be a socially friendly place if it passes into private hands? They debated with urban activists and the city authorities over the type of public space to be created around the museum’s new building, and reminded us that after 1989, the urban life of the Polish capital injected its energy here, filling the space of Plac Defilad with bus stations, parking lots, shopping arcades and food joints. The square, which stood apart from the dynamic transformation of other neighborhoods, only seemed on the surface to remain empty. Warsaw Under Construction 9 in 2017 was entirely devoted to Plac Defilad at a significant moment in its change into a central urban square.

On Plac Defilad today, we see the large mass of the museum with is minimalist façade of white concrete, placed between the soaring structure of the Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science and Domy Centrum, a set of retail structures stretching for a length of 350 meters. After two decades operating as a nomadic institution, the museum is now permanently embedded in the surrounding cityscape. The present and history overlap in many aspects of MSN Warsaw’s new home, the touchstone for the agenda of the 16th Warsaw Under Construction festival, titled The Museum Between the Square and the Palace.