The Thrill on Two Wheels: How the Bicycle Is Changing Warsaw exhibition, open from Friday through July 2, 2027, traces the bicycle's role in the city from its earliest days to the present.
"We start in 1886, when the Warsaw Cyclists' Society was founded and bicycles began appearing on city streets, and we continue right up to the present day," co-curator Piotr Kubkowski told Poland's PAP news agency.
The show draws on photographs, film, art, artifacts and period publications spread across three floors of the museum.
Early images document the Warsaw Cyclists' Society and illustrate the bicycle's role in women's empowerment, including photographs of cycling record-holder Karolina Kocięcka and Skłodowska-Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist, astride a bicycle.
Interwar photographs show Warsaw's Kamiński Factory — once the city's largest bicycle manufacturer, located in the Wola district — delivering cycles to the Polish Army.
Wartime images show rickshaws and makeshift repair stalls, reflecting how crucial the bicycle was for navigating the rubble of the postwar capital.
"During the communist era, we see the bicycle becoming the focus of the collective imagination through successive stages of the Peace Race," Kubkowski said, referring to the prestigious Cold War-era cycling competition whose Warsaw finishes were held at the now-defunct 10th Anniversary Stadium.
The show also includes a 1950 Peace Race scarf and a photo report on rural postwoman in the 1950s for whom the bicycle was their primary work tool.
Visitors can view a collection of Warsaw Cyclists' Society badges, historic bicycles manufactured before both world wars and during the communist period, drawings, posters and avant-garde works, as well as excerpts from the oldest cycling periodicals published in Poland when it was under foreign rule.
Film materials include documentation of cycling protests from the early 2000s, provided by the Zielone Mazowsze association, and a postwar socialist-realist film depicting the tension between individual athletic achievement and collective effort.
The exhibition's basement level has been handed over to cycling activist Henryk Kwiatek, who campaigns to save the Orzeł velodrome in the Praga district, and who will shape that space as an independent, punk-inflected area alongside Warsaw artists and community organizers.
"The bicycle changes Warsaw above all by transforming its residents." Kubkowski said. "It once offered them a certain freedom and new possibilities through easier mobility. Today it again changes their perception of space, time, and other people — restoring a human scale to a city subordinated to car traffic."
Nextbike, operator of Warsaw's Veturilo bike-share system, is among the exhibition's partners and plans to install a rental station in front of the museum for the duration of the show.
(jh/gs)
Source: PAP