OFF AND ON

Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen: Can you tell us about the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s genesis? In architecture circles, the competition history is a thing of legend...

Joanna Mytkowska: The last major museum building to go up in Poland — the Warsaw National Museum — dates from 1938, so there was a huge period when nothing was built, which meant that our museum was highly anticipated. In 2004, when Poland joined the European Union and there were suddenly funds for big infrastructure projects, the city of Warsaw and the national government decided to initiate the process of building the Museum of Modern Art. From the beginning, our museum was a highly political endeavor, part of a grander scheme of modernizing Warsaw. Under Polish procurement law, architects are treated in a very bureaucratic way — for instance, they must prove they’re not criminals. The rules provoked a huge scandal during the first international competition, in 2005, because famous foreign architects like Zaha Hadid, who wanted to participate because it was a very unusual opportunity to design in the heart of a European capital, were unable to do so. As a result, much of the jury protested and resigned. The second competition, in 2006–07, was organized along more typical international lines. Christine Binswanger of Herzog & de Meuron, the then Tate director Nick Serota, and the Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind were on the jury, alongside a mix of international and local architects and art critics. After a quite dynamic discussion, they selected the project by Swiss architect Christian Kerez. The local artistic milieu was very divided about this, as was the programming board of the museum. This was at the beginning of Facebook, so it was the first time such a big public drama played out on social media.

Did the public dispute arise because the first prize was not awarded to a local Polish architect?

Yes. But I think the problem with the second competition, which was the lesson we learned, was that the expectation was not precisely defined. That should have been the role of the museum team, but it was very new and very politically driven by the idea of a big building in the center of Warsaw, so the program they delivered to the architects was more superficial. There was nothing about aesthetics or the history of the site on a metaphorical or symbolic level — for example its location in front of the Palace of Culture and Science, with its charged Soviet heritage. Nor was there a discussion with the public about what the museum should stand for. So, when this pure, super minimalistic shape was published, the internet went crazy — Christian Kerez immediately became the best-known and most controversial architect in Poland. Big buildings are always about politics, and this negative public reaction came in the wake of the 2006 municipal elections. Normally, the mayor might have canceled the project, but because Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz was newly elected, she couldn’t make such a controversial decision. So Kerez’s project was accepted in February 2007, which led to the museum’s director resigning immediately afterwards because he didn’t want to continue with the design. No one, literally no one, wanted to work on this project. I appeared at that moment by pure coincidence. I was working at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, so I was considered the only viable candidate, because I was an outsider, neither involved in this huge dispute nor part of the scandal. The Minister of Culture personally came to France to offer me the job.

What made you accept it?

I was young and naive. [Laughs.] When I told my director at the Pompidou why I was leaving, he laughed and told me I would never make a show in that museum, that I’d only be fighting with politicians, that these big projects are a disaster for the curators. But I left and came to Warsaw in 2007, and tried to build with Christian. With great enthusiasm, we created a whole milieu of supporters, but then we came up against another major obstacle. After the Second World War, the land in Warsaw was nationalized, but in the 1990s Poland started the reprivatization process, which caused enormous complications. Parks, hospitals, and schools built with public funds during Communism were being handed over to the pre-war owners of the land, or whoever was claiming to be the owner. This was a huge impediment to Warsaw’s development, because there were constant lawsuits about who owned what, especially the land in the city center, which had great value. We couldn’t get the building permit because it couldn’t be proved that the municipality owned the site. After four years, the city canceled the project.

That’s when you decided to use temporary spaces to host the museum, including the former furniture showroom, Emilia. How did the idea of a nomadic museum develop?

On the one hand, we were totally involved in supporting Kerez’s construction, but on the other, we were building a community. We had a responsibility to the public, the team, and the artists. There’s a question of momentum in a city’s trajectory, where it’s developed enough for public art institutions to be of interest, but there’s still no infrastructure, no collectors, and not a lot of money. Everything is not stacked into a bourgeois model, so it’s given to whoever is interested, which is mostly artists. Running into all these issues with the Kerez building, we eventually realized that the project itself was more important than the architect. After a few months, we managed to convince the mayor to restart it.

What made the new building possible in the end?

It was a long process. Over the years, the museum had become a cultural voice in Warsaw with a group of enthusiasts who could convince the city of its necessity. It took us two years to prepare a smaller, very detailed program for a new competition brief, more adjusted to the reality of Warsaw, the budget, and what we are — a museum based not so much on great collections but on temporary exhibitions and very dynamic public programs. This led to the third competition, in 2013–14, which took the form of interviews with the architects, since we wanted the public mission of the museum included right from the start. There were no drawings or designs for the competition. After visiting the Corning Museum of Glass, in upstate New York, we selected the architect responsible for its most recent expansion, Thomas Phifer.

Unlike some of the temporary locations, the new building is much more of a classic white-cube museum. In some of your temporary spaces, you experimented with ways of staging shows that were quite unusual, often approaching artworks through research on their history and political significance. On several occasions, you collaborated with the Berlin-based architect Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge, like in Who Will Write the History of Tears, a 2021 exhibition about the repressions imposed on female bodies, which paid homage to the work of artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. The show’s powerful design was a big part of its success. Will this experimental curatorial approach continue in your new, permanent building?

Display design was, at a certain point, extremely important. But if it’s repeated show after show, its power can diminish. Recently, the Zachęta [Warsaw’s National Gallery of Art] got rid of its populist director and reopened with a show without any display design at all — just works from the collection and furniture by young designers. To me, this felt like such a political gesture. Display can be a great challenge but also a great limitation. It really depends on the situation. With the new building, everything is more or less five times bigger than any of the spaces we had before, so we also plan to show pieces from our archive, including a collection of recent protest art. With our first few shows, we will have to get to know and understand the architecture of our new building.