Book launch: A Form of Friendship

A subjective, candid, multi-vocal story about the creation of the building of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Warsaw’s Parade Square, where the MSN building designed by Thomas Phifer stands, is a unique place and a meaningful context for the Museum. The square, over which the Palace of Culture looms, was Poland’s centre of communist state life. Later, it was the arena for the formation of Polish capitalism, with market stalls and gleaming office towers sprouting up around it. This is where fierce land reprivatization disputes erupted, and where newcomers to Warsaw first arrive on trains and buses—including refugees from Ukraine under attack from Russia. Michał Murawski interweaves these threads, pinpointing the “spatio-temporal and infrastructural nexus” in which the new Museum exists, and proposing an institutional “ideology” to emerge from it. The author’s tour-de-force essay introduces a narrative, further explored through conversations with experts in art, architecture, and activism. A timeline summarizes the complex history of MSN’s new building. The guide throughout this story is Alina Szapocznikow’s 1954 sculpture Friendship, which for almost forty years welcomed those entering the Palace, only to later disappear from view, and now returns, albeit in an amputated form, to the square—in the Museum of Modern Art.

Dr Michał Murawski will be introduced by Nick Simcik, Chair of History and Theory at the AA, and will be in discussion with contributors Professor Sarah Wilson from The Courtauld Institute of Art, artist R.I.P. Germain, who made an excellent and subversive piece about the new museum building for its inaugural exhibition, and Deyan Sudjić.

We are delighted to welcome Michał Murawski and his guests to the AA Bookshop to celebrate the launch of his new book.

The book will be sold at the special price of £25 (RRP £28)

This event is organised in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and The FRINGE Centre at SSEES, University College London (@uclssees).