Recently, I took my 9 year old daughter to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which sounds like a very cultured way to spend a Saturday until you remember that you are taking a 9 year old to a modern art museum and have absolutely no idea how long her patience is going to last.
Luckily, my daughter is getting more and more interested in photography, so while I was looking at the exhibitions, she was wandering around with her phone and taking pictures, just like her father. I have to admit, seeing her doing that made me ridiculously happy.
I let my kids choose what they want to do, because I do not want anymore to manufacture little versions of myself. If they want football, fine. If they want music, science, drawing, dancing, whatever, I am happy as long as they find something that makes them curious and gives them a way to express themselves. Photography happens to be something I understand rather well, so naturally I am going to encourage it, but the important thing is that they find their own way of looking at the world.
And believe me, she already has a certain eye for it.
That is probably what pleased me most about the whole visit. It was not about getting her to understand every artwork or making her suddenly interested in the history of modern art. She was simply looking around, noticing things, deciding what she found interesting and trying to capture them with her phone. For a photographer, that instinct to stop and look at something when everyone else is walking past it is probably more important than knowing all the right words to describe what you are seeing.
I have always believed that we need art in our lives, just as we need sport, knowledge, music, books and all the other things that make life more than simply getting up, going to work and coming home again. Art gives us another language, another way of looking at people and places, and sometimes it gives us questions when we were not even looking for answers.
I also really liked the museum itself. I have a weakness for this kind of architecture, with its sober lines, simple geometry and lack of unnecessary decoration. It does not desperately demand your attention, which is probably why I liked it so much. The building creates a calm, almost neutral space and then lets the art start the argument.
Amongst the exhibitions we visited were Edward Dwurnik, and “The Surrealism And Anti Fascist Exhibition”, two very different experiences that gave me plenty to look at and, naturally, plenty to photograph. I will share some of those photographs here because, ultimately, that is how I tend to remember exhibitions anyway, through the images I took and the things that caught my attention rather than through a perfectly organised list of dates and names.
I was also particularly interested in seeing Minh Lan Tran. I had already looked at her work online before visiting the museum, and I was genuinely curious to see how it would feel in the physical space. Her approach to materials and the relationship between the work, the body and the architecture really caught my attention, so I was rather disappointed to discover that there was only one work on display.
One piece.
After looking at her work online, I wanted more than that. Much more, actually.
Still, the visit was worth it, and not only because of the exhibitions. I came out with a camera full of pictures, my daughter came out with a phone full of her own pictures, and somewhere between the two of us wandering around the museum, looking at strange things and pointing cameras at them, I realised that this is probably exactly what I want for my kids.
Not that they become like me, but that they become curious enough to find their own way of seeing things.
And if that happens to involve a camera, well, I am certainly not going to complain.
