Central Square in downtown Warsaw is immense. Occupying 60 acres, it has had umpteen uses since its creation in the 1950s. Reflecting its erstwhile name of Parade Square, it hosted many a political procession during Poland’s era of communist rule. Pope John Paul II gave a giant open-air mass there in 1987. Funfairs and flea markets filled it in the 1990s, since when the square has mostly served as a parking lot.
‘Now, however, it’s being totally reimagined,’ says Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (also known as MSN Warsaw). ‘There’s no square in Europe like this one, and the topic of how to use it caused discussion, disagreement and tension in Poland for a long time.’
More on this below, but Mytkowska is referring to a period that began in 1989 with the collapse of communism. Eventually, the city of Warsaw decided that the square should serve a cultural purpose. A theatre called TR Warszawa is currently under construction — on a site adjacent to MSN Warsaw, which opened in February.
Spread across four floors, the museum owns an ever-expanding art collection, currently numbering about 4,000 pieces. It focuses chiefly on work made in the 36 years since democracy returned to Poland. International artists do feature, but two-thirds of the pieces are by Poles — the likes of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mirosław Bałka, Wilhelm Sasnal and Ewa Juszkiewicz.