WARSAW.- On Saturday, 25 March, a new temporary contemporary art space opened along the Vistula River in Powiśle, one of Warsaw’s most historic neighborhoods. Situated near the Copernicus Science Centre and the Warsaw University Library, the Museum on the Vistula will host exhibitions and events, providing a meeting point for all until the Museum’s new building in Plac Defilad opens in 2020.
Designed by renowned Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz, the Pavilion has been made available to the Museum through a collaboration with the Vienna-based Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) foundation. Common exhibition projects are planned in the future.
“The fact that Adolf Krischanitz’ wonderful temporary exhibition space will become a center for contemporary art and culture in Warsaw is very exciting,” notes Francesca von Habsburg, founder and chairwoman of TBA21. “Its interim use in Powiśle will create an extraordinary, experimental space – not only inside, but outside as well – offering visitors and passers by a unique and direct experience of contemporary art.”
Conceived as a movable and reusable structure, the Museum on the Vistula features a 600 square-meter exhibition space, with an additional exterior area for the presentation of art, as well as an opportunity for artists to design the building’s façade. First installed in the center of Berlin at the former site of the Palace of the Republic, the Pavilion offered a provisional space for the Temporäre Kunsthalle, a temporary contemporary art installation that hosted events and exhibitions for two years between 2008 and 2010.
The time restrictions for this interim exhibition space were reflected in Krischanitz’s beautifully clear and deliberate design, which emphasizes a range of possibilities for quick transformations, elasticity, and functionality. The main hall is conceived as a wooden construction with open-web girders, while the surrounding strip foundations form a stable basis for the wooden elements that emerge from them. The surfaces of the exterior skin and the inner walls are made from fiber-cement panels.
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw inaugurated the Pavilion in Powiśle with an exhibition that explores the cultural connotations and universality of Warsaw’s iconic symbol within the context of creating a modern urban identity.
The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest features the works of national and internationally renowned artists, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Evelyne Axell, Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Louise Bourgeois, Bernard Buffet, Claude Cahun, Liz Craft, Edith Dekyndt, Christian Dietrich, Leo Dohmen, Drexcyia with Abdul Qadim Haqq, Elmgreen & Dragset, Leonor Fini, Ellen Gallagher, Dorota Jurczak, Birgit Jürgenssen, Tobias Kaspar, Gina Litherland, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Pablo Picasso, Agnieszka Polska, Carol Rama, Erna Rosenstein, Tejal Shah, Penny Slinger, Juliana Snapper, Franz von Stuck, Alina Szapocznikow, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tunga, Anne Uddenberg, Hannah Wilke, Ming Wong, Marcelo Zammenhoff, Anna Zaradny and Artur Żmijewski.
