For the eighth time, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, together with the Society of Friends of the Museum, is hosting an exhibition and co-organising a charity auction of the art community for the benefit of people with migration and refugee experience.
Curators of the exhibition Jagna Lewandowska.

On the road
The text for the catalogue of Refugees Welcome - the exhibition and auction, now in its eighth year with the Survivor Foundation - is being written in the first half of November 2024. There are still two months to go before the event begins, and already today the temperature has dropped to zero and the first snow has appeared. I'm looking at Kateryna Lysowenko's intriguing painting entitled Migrant Swans, which the artist has donated for the January auction. The birds of the title sit in a train compartment next to a man with blurred facial features. Their black, almost human legs droop from their seats, and there is nothing but blue sky outside the train window. Not all swans migrate, but many seek safe refuge year after year at bodies of water that have not been forged by ice - in western and southern Europe. Nature has always been in constant motion.

According to the report Passage is gone. Deaths of migrants at the European Union border with Belarus, edited by Alicja Palecka of the Ocalenie Foundation, "from the beginning of the humanitarian crisis (...) in 2021 until the end of March 2024, the deaths of 116 people at the border in four countries (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland) were documented, and migrants themselves reported at least 26 more deaths to activists in their testimonies". I dread to think what these statistics look like now and what they will look like in January 2025, when even more people on the move will surely suffer in the border forests, as a result of hypothermia and exhaustion, often the result of multiple push-backs.

Survivor supported 15 000 migrants and refugees from all parts of the world last year alone. The situation on the Polish-Belarusian border is not improving at all, more and more people are arriving in the European Union in need of support, and social mobilisation following the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine is unfortunately waning. The Foundation is seeing fewer and fewer donors and was forced to close its branches in Lodz and Lomza this year.

This year's pre-auction exhibition is the first in the MSN building, returned to the public after a two-week opening festival in October. This edition of the auction lacks the momentum familiar from previous years, when the number of participating artists increased each year. Having learned and learnt from experience, together with the Ocalenie Foundation and the Society of Friends of the Museum of Modern Art, we are measuring up. We are not breaking sales records, but rather, thanks to the generous donations of artistic individuals, we want to focus on the systematic, ongoing maintenance and support of activities that take place quietly but often determine someone's to be or not to be.

The exhibition features works by, among others: Jan Dobkowski, Dominika Kowynia, Jarosław Fliciński, Mariola Przyjemska or Joanna Piotrowska. In the upper galleries of the MSN, the installation of the collection exhibition is underway, which will begin in February 2025. Right next to the room where we are now showing the works donated by the artists, an installation from the Museum's collection by Sandra Mujingi-an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo-will be on display. In its form, this sculpture resembles the construction of a nomadic, lightweight shelter used by people on the move. We very much hope that, thanks to your support, this journey will have a happy ending for many people.