Museums in Times of Polycrisis | Betlej, Majmurek, Modrzewska, Nowicka

Museums in Times of Polycrisis | Betlej, Majmurek, Modrzewska, Nowicka

Krytyka Polityczna and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invite you to the meeting “Museums in Times of Polycrisis”.

📅 17 February (Tuesday), 18:00
📍 Auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN)
🎟️ Free admission.

Host:

• Martyna Nowicka

Participants:

• Andrzej Betlej
• Jakub Majmurek
• Aldona Modrzewska

The word “museum” today evokes not only associations with building collections or protecting heritage, but a whole range of ways to spend free time: visiting exhibitions, workshops, debates on current issues, and meetings with creators.

A discussion about whether institutions are closer to a temple or rather to a forum seems, from a contemporary perspective, misguided — without visitors, without an audience museums today seem to lose their reason for being. In the past, the answer to the question of the role of museums in times of crisis seemed simply to be persistence and protection of collections. Today, when museums perform a different function in society, is persistence a sufficient response? How can institutions react to the surrounding political reality, wars, climate change and how should they communicate these actions to audiences? Does the character of collections influence how institutions act in moments of crisis? And finally — how can contemporary museums prepare for the future?

Speakers:

• Dr hab. Andrzej Betlej – professor at Jagiellonian University, art historian; former director of the National Museum in Kraków (2016–2020), since 2020 director of the Royal Castle on Wawel. Author of over 200 scholarly works, specializing in research on the art of the eastern lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
• Dr Martyna Nowicka – historian and art critic, curator; PhD in humanities in the discipline of art studies, graduate of theatre studies and art history and the CuratorLab program at Konstfack (Stockholm). She studies twentieth-century museology and the development of art museums.
• Jakub Majmurek – film scholar, essayist and columnist for Krytyka Polityczna; film critic who also writes about literature and visual arts. He publishes in press and outlets such as "Tygodnik Powszechny", "Gazeta Wyborcza", Oko.press and others.
• Aldona Modrzewska – cultural institution manager and long-time museum professional with experience in management, administration and projects; former manager in the team of the POLIN Museum, author of documents concerning collection management.

The meeting takes place as part of the project “Museums in Times of Polycrisis” funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (KPO).