Marysia Lewandowska

Born Szczecin, Poland
Since 1985 lives and works in London
www.marysialewandowska.com

Museum Vocabularies 1966 - 199
Projection of 80 slides and printed matter
2010

All contemporary museums function as nodes in a complex web of economic, social and cultural relationships. Their exhibition and events programmes are carefully developed over the years of sustained dialogues and exchanges. The truly global set of relations is often embedded in support systems, trust and inventiveness of their individual directors. During his 25-year directorship of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Ryszard Stanisławski (1921-2000) developed friendships with important figures of the museum world, many of who shaped progressive institutions especially in Europe. Amongst them were Rudi Oxenaar of Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Pontus Hulten at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and later Centre Pompidou in Paris, Thomas Messer director of the Guggenheim between 1961 and 1988, Herald Szemaann and Jürgen Harten. Stanisławski’s awareness of the importance of intellectual exchanges has contributed to the international recognition and status of Muzeum Sztuki and its artists’ centered legacy. The frequent journeys of Stanisławski to the ‘former west’, represented in the photographs he took, draw a more complex map of cultural politics in the pre-1989 Poland. Rather than remaining on the margins he functioned in what could be understood as a ‘state of exception’. What emerges from his photographs is a detailed observation, a form of inventory of the world collapsed into the museum experience. There are images of museum heating systems, door handles, stairwells, as well as cocktail parties and openings, encounters with individual curators, and atmospheric hotel rooms. It is also a picture of the accumulation of knowledge undetected by the political regime of the time, until recently stored in a private archive. Now its value can be examined and re-assessed as it enters the public domain. This particular sequence also records and pre-figures a time before ‘Bilbao effect’ where most cities did not look to museum architecture for economic salvation.