MSN Warsaw Director Joanna Mytkowska on Museums in Times of Change

Joanna Mytkowska is the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warsaw), which moved into a high-profile new home in the middle of the Polish capital last fall. Set in Warsaw’s Central Square near the Palace of Culture and Science—a Communist-era landmark dedicated to Jospeh Stalin in 1955—MSN Warsaw’s white modernist building cuts a dramatic figure in a city that has undergone tremendous change. The museum was designed by American architect Thomas Phifer, best-known for his work on Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland.

Mytkowska has been MSN Warsaw’s director since 2007 and led the institution through a tumultuous period during eight years of right-wing Populist rule in Poland from 2015 to 2023. This past summer, the new museum was a flashpoint in the Poland’s presidential election, when the progressive mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, lost to nationalist candidate Karol Nawrocki, signaling another rightward shift. (Donald Tusk, of the Civic Platform party, remains Poland’s more powerful prime minister, and a parliamentary election in 2027 will be pivotal in the country’s political future.)

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Mytkowska spoke with ARTnews about MSN Warsaw’s first year in its new home, which launched with a series of performances last fall before installing “The Impermanent: Works from the MSN Collection” (on view through October 5). Forthcoming exhibitions include “Near East, Far West—Kyiv Biennial 2025” (opening October 3) and “The City of Women,” a four-part show opening in November that includes “The Woman Question: 1550-2025,” curated by Alison M. Gingeras.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: How do you feel about the first year in MSN Warsaw’s new home?

Joanna Mytkowska: The new building already has the status of an icon because of its location in the center of Warsaw next to the Palace of Culture and Science. The location encapsulates layers of history in Poland, from war and Communism to the transformation of the country. Our collection is trying to help people from other places understand that transformation by showing international contemporary art from a local perspective. For the local public, the museum is more controversial. There were huge expectations from people waiting for this building for 20 years, and people can get very upset if they don’t find themselves or their own story in the collection. There are young artists who say that the museum not radical enough. And then people more interested in traditional ways of talking about history ask, “Why you are not telling a chronological story?” There are very different perspectives and very different views.

But we are happy because what’s going on around the museum is extremely intense. We see that there are emotions all around, even if some of them are critical. We are also, for good and for bad, in the middle of the political debate about the shape of the future of Poland. We were very often mentioned during the recent campaign for the President of the Republic, by different sides in very different ways. So this is a process that is ongoing. History will tell us how it will evolve, in a few years.

In your essay in a volume about MSN’s collection, you mention the museum’s long-standing “ambivalence toward the nature of the canon.” What is the source of that ambivalence?

That has always part of the identity of this institution. In our beginning were very close with the artistic community of Warsaw, and that was a rather progressive community. We managed to become an institution thanks to support of the artistic community of the city. It was a huge job to convince the government to build this museum and to negotiate with different groups, but our initial milieu was the community of artists. Contemporary art in Poland has a rather difficult history. During Communism, progressive artistic production was on the margins of official life in Poland. And then, being a contemporary artist during the time of transformation in the ’90s and early 2000s was a matter of survival. There were no institutions, and no art market. All the elements of artistic life here appeared relatively recently.

We are coming from the roots of self-organized radical artistic communities, and in that frame, there is pressure to change the canon presented in more traditional museums like the National Museum of Warsaw. There is pressure to renegotiate the canon by adding female artists, showing different perspectives, thinking about colonialism and all the issues discussed in museums around the world. We can articulate this in a clear, straightforward way because it’s easier for a new museum, because we are trying to find a place for ourselves. That makes it easier than when you are a museum with 100 years of tradition and a big collection of great male artists. For us, we just started, and our collection is building up right now. So renegotiating the canon is definitely part of our identity.

The museum was founded in 2005 but didn’t start collecting until 2011. What initiated that change?

There was no support before. When the government started this museum, there was no concept of collecting contemporary art for public museums at all. During Communism, there was no infrastructure for public institutions to buy contemporary art. By lobbying and putting pressure on the Ministry of Culture, we managed to negotiate a special grant program for four museums dealing with contemporary art—for our museum, Muzeum Sztuki in Łodz, the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (MOCAK). The four museums apply every year for money for their collection from the Ministry of Culture, and a committee evaluates the applications. In the best years, our museum could get around €1 million (around $1.17 million). Then, during Populism in Poland [from 2015 through 2023], it was much less; in the worst year it was something like €30,000 ($35,100). But we have managed to buy work for the collection and, in almost 15 years, have collected around 1,000 works. Our current exhibition is showing some 150 of those works.

The concept for the first exhibition in the new building was to open with a deliberately fragmentary, differentiated show, to show different aspects of the collection. How did you arrive upon that idea?

For the opening show the challenge was how to talk to the very different publics, from experts and specialists and those who understand our evolution and what we stand for to those who will come to the museum for the first time. It’s not easy to build a narrative with such a young collection, so that’s why we decided not to make a chronological show or focus on the local art scene. We decided to show the dynamics we are working with. We are a local museum, but we are in touch with a global community of artists, and we are sharing a lot of points of view. We are part of a vivid and dynamic community that is extremely transnational. We were trying to share our experience of that along with our belief that such a community is possible, because that idea is obviously in danger today. We also tried to give space to each work of art and not to reduce their meaning. We divided our opening exhibition into four different takes on the collection to leave a lot of space for different interpretations.

How did you think about how to show the collection to viewers from Poland versus those looking from outside? How did you think about perceptions within Poland in relation to what you’re projecting beyond?

It’s a contradiction. It’s completely different to talk to the “international contemporary art public” and the local public. By coincidence, the opening of the museum coincided with the campaign for the President of the Republic, and the mayor of Warsaw, who was in charge of the [museum-opening] process, was one of the candidates. So we were really in different worlds at the same time. We have always been part of the international art community on the activist side, but to build this building, we were very involved in local politics. We’ve had a lot of programs dedicated to introducing change to the city. The museum has organized a festival called “Warsaw Under Construction” for 17 years now, and that is dedicated to lobbying politicians for what inhabitants of Warsaw could dream about. And we have been dealing with different issues in the city. For instance, eight years ago we did a show about immigration issues created together with Ukrainian colleagues, so we we’ve had experience talking to the non-art-interested public. And we’re hoping that in this new building with this new amazing view on the city square, we will attract new members to our community.

You mentioned that the museum was discussed in the recent election. How was it characterized and mischaracterized?

The right-wing candidate [Karol Nawrocki] and his whole campaign tried to create an image of the museum as an institution that cost a lot of money and is showing art that is disturbing for “normal” people—a lot of nudity, a lot of work dealing with the LGBT community, a lot of work representing sexual activity. That is not true, but it’s the way it was described, and that makes it extremely difficult to discuss. The city of Warsaw built this museum—it’s a fully public project—but the mayor tried not to mention this too much in the campaign because there’s no language one can use to rationally discuss issues with the radical right wing at the moment. The mayor, in one of the last debates, mentioned that this is a very nice building but he’s not in charge of the program, which is true.

This a big question for us because we stand, even more than usual for museums, for progressive ideas. But with such polarization, I don’t know the most effective way of communicating nuances of our position. Maybe now, after the campaign, the situation will be a bit better, but campaigns are extremely brutal, and there’s no space for discussion. Of course, that was only an election for the President, and Poland has a parliamentary system, so there won’t necessarily be changes for institutions. Those changes can happen after the parliamentary election in 2027, depending on how that goes. But the pressure to change might happen because people can be afraid of the consequences if the parliament should also change. Hopefully we will see the wisdom of the people of Poland and the democratic system in the next election. But we don’t know. In 2023, everybody thought because we elected democrats, we [as a country] were safe. But as we see, safety is never really granted.

From 2015 to 2023, you navigated eight years of Populist rule as Poland was led by the right-wing Law and Justice Party. How did you balance trying to remain active and progressive as an institution while also avoiding political turmoil?

During that time, we were still small. We could survive because we were not very visible. And when the Populist party started, they were not Populist all the time—they were proper conservative. In the beginning they were testing what they could do. They were not immediately destroying everything. I was negotiating with the Ministry of Culture, and at the time we were not attractive to take over because we were in the process of construction, which is difficult and risky. There were not many people eager to take on that responsibility for no reason. But they were also different. They were not so aggressively, brutally ideological in the beginning. We could still negotiate with them.

Self-censorship can occur in this kind of situation, and while we didn’t do that, we were very careful. We did a show on the passing of an extremely disappointing abortion law in Poland, and we focused on the history of how female artists have fought against that kind of regulation. We did it in a way that it was educational, so we could show what we wanted, but we were careful how it was described. So it influenced our program, but it didn’t erase important positions from the program. We negotiated. That’s how we survived. I also got the advice from experts, because talking with the Minister of Culture was not normal conversation. Different opinions were not welcome. So I was trained, like the way that political leaders are trained in how to talk with Donald Trump. You need certain skills. You never openly say “no,” and sometimes you should say nothing, because it makes no sense to fight with a wall. We learned this lesson, and I would be very interested to exchange our experience [with other institutions], because now many places we have this issue.

Have you been following what’s been happening at some of the museums and institutions in the United States? What are your thoughts on that, from your perspective?

From day one, we have kept telling our American friends, “you will have to fight.” For us, we went through an eight-year resistance. And “to fight” meant to articulate our position and find a way to have a space for our position. It was a very complex process because we had to invent from scratch a sort of common agreement. In your case, in America, there has been a common agreement for centuries. In our case, we have been working on one for just the last 30 years. In Western Europe, it has been 70 years—but democracies are not functioning right now.

You can have different opinions and follow different ideologies. But there was a certain legal frame, and now this frame, at least in Poland, from what I experienced, is broken. In Poland the Populist government was not following the rules. They were interpreting the law in ways it cannot be interpreted with the rules we know, and that’s a huge problem.

In the United States it’s different, but we don’t know. We want to make a show and have a working title: “Political Art Under the First and Second Trump.” It seems like there was much more protest the first time, and civil society was protecting itself. Now it looks like it’s hopeless. We want to do that show but don’t want to focus on Donald Trump—he’s just a metaphor. We want to see how civil society is changing. As long as people think civil society has value in itself, it can survive. But now it’s hard to know. We have not seen so many protests in in United States. Or maybe I have a wrong impression…

So far you are correct. It seems like a lot of people are still just stunned.

In Poland we have experience of self-organization, and we have experience with the state being against us during Communism. I can see how in America it must be shocking that the state is against its citizens, or at least certain groups of citizens. This is shocking. But if you don’t protect your own institutions, it allows for pure craziness. I have no illusion that there is some other sort of big ideas behind it—the idea is just to consume everything, all your freedom, all your rights, step by step. As much as you let it happen, it will happen. You need resistance.