Exhibitions

The permanent exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien provides insights into the most extensive and comprehensive collection on Austrian architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the centre is the investigation of key exponents, including well-known and less well-known objects. Seven Hot Questions bring Cold Storage to life.

The Architekturzentrum Wien is the only museum in Austria devoted exclusively to architecture. As the Az W Collection has expanded over the last 17 years and consists of over 100 architects’ archives as well as extensive collections of individual projects, a large number of objects are being shown for the first time in the Permanent Exhibition: ‘Hot Questions — Cold Storage’. Selected models, drawings, furniture, fabrics, documents and films develop new threads in seven thematic episodes. Each episode is preceded by one of today’s burning issues, a Hot Question that brings Cold Storage to life.

The nation’s building activity with all of its cultural, social, economic and technical ramifications is made strikingly visible. The contents covered range from the special significance of Red Vienna to architectural pedagogical experiments in the wake of the 1968 movement or architectural revolts in Vorarlberg, to historical and current examples of environmental rethinking. The exhibition also engages with the ideological instrumentalisation of architecture and spatial planning and the active collaboration of architects in authoritarian systems, as well as their resistance. At the same time, the exhibition challenges deficits in the canon of Austrian architectural history, for instance from a perspective of gender equality. New players are featured, light is shed on previously little known sources and the key focus is on multiple perspectives instead of on a national historical narrative. This diversity is also reflected in the exhibition design. The sheer variety of the exponents and their display makes a visit to the exhibition a sensual and an atmospheric experience.

Concept: Angelika Fitz, Monika Platzer
Curator: Monika Platzer
Curatorial Assistance: Sonja Pisarik, Iris Ranzinger, Katrin Stingl
Production: Andreas Kurz
Finances und conversion: Karin Lux
Assistance: Barbara Kapsammer
Exhibition design: tracing spaces / Michael Hieslmair, Michael Zinganel ; seite zwei / Christoph Schörkhuber, Stefanie Wurnitsch

Adolf Krischanitz, Otto Steidle, Herzog & de Meuron: Wohnsiedlung Pilotengasse, Wien 22, 1987–1992, Modell Gesamtanlage Bauteil Krischanitz

The exhibition Mapping the 60s is based on the thought that substantial sociopolitical movements of the twenty-first century have their roots in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, for example, have built on the anti-racist and feminist upheavals of yesteryear—as have current debates on war, mass media and mechanization, consumerism, and capitalism.
The developments of the 1960s in general and the events around 1968 in particular are not only paradigmatic in social and political terms, but also essential with regard to cultural policies. In 1962, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts was founded in Vienna, a precursor of mumok, whose collection focuses on Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, performance art, Conceptual Art, and Minimal Art—artistic movements of the 1960s. Even when we ask ourselves how to address art history today and make it productive, we encounter discussions that go back to that decade.

Curated by Manuela Ammer, Marianne Dobner, Heike Eipeldauer, Naoko Kaltschmidt, Matthias Michalka, Franz Thalmair

Artists: Arman, Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, Evelyne Axell, Jo Baer, John Baldessari, Iain Baxter, Marlène Belilos / André Gazut, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, George Brecht, Peter Brüning, Jack Burnham, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Christo, Chryssa, Jef Cornelis, Robert Cumming, François Dallegret, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Öyvind Fahlström, Mathilde Flögl, Sam Francis, Karl Gerstner, Alviani Getulio, John Giorno, Domenico Gnoli, Roland Goeschl, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Raymond Hains, Sine Hansen, David Hockney, Michael Heizer, Richard Hamilton, Duane Hanson, Jann Haworth, Dick Higgins, Davi Det Hompson, Robert Huot, Robert Indiana, Alain Jacquet, Olga Jančić, Tess Jaray, Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, Asger Jorn, Allan Kaprow, Ellsworth Kelly, Corita Kent, Edward Kienholz, Konrad Klapheck, Kiki Kogelnik, Joseph Kosuth, Gary Kuehn, John Lennon, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Ronald Nameth, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jules Olitski, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Pino Pascali, Walter Pichler, Larry Poons, Mel Ramos, Germaine Richier, Bridget Riley, Jean-Paul Riopelle, James Rosenquist, Teresa Rudowicz, Carolee Schneemann, Karl Schwanzer, George Segal, Richard Serra, Miriam Shapiro, Robert Smithson, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Keith Sonnier, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Thek, Walasse Ting, Günther Uecker, Bram van Velde, Stan Vanderbeek, Frank Lincoln Viner, Franz Erhard Walther, Franz Erhard Walther / Arno Uth, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, Tom Wesselmann, William T. Wiley

Sine Hansen On Top, 1967 130 cm x 120 cm x 2.8 cm Egg tempera on canvas mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, since 2021 © Nora Meyer

This exhibition focuses on the transformative years of mumok under the directorship of Dieter Ronte (1979–1989). Exemplary insights into the heterogeneity of the collection expansions are juxtaposed with the culturalpolitical parameters and programmatic decisions of this decade.

“Never Final”—a concept articulated by Hertha Firnberg—continues to define mumok as a dynamic place of change to this day. This idea is brought to life in the exhibition through an open format featuring interactive furniture and dialogue spaces, presenting the museum as a platform for collective research, learning, and reflection.

Curated by Marie-Therese Hochwartner and Dieter Ronte

Maria Lassnig. Fliegen lernen / Learning to Fly, 1976. 177 x 127 cm. Tempera auf Leinwand / Tempera on canvas. mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, erworben / acquired in 1980. © Maria Lassnig Stiftung

Beyond mere chronology and style histories, the exhibition The World of Tomorrow Will Have Been Another Present traces narratives in the mumok collection of classical modernism that resonate to the present day.

The departure point is a form of speculation firmly anchored in temporality—a temporality with circular tendencies. “Speculation,” says cultural scientist Karin Harrasser, “is not about the extrapolation of the present or betting on probable processes; it has to do with a retroactive allegiance, an operation in Future II: speculative thinking has to measure up with the possibilities that it will have brought into being.”*

Who, if not the artists from a collection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries like that of the mumok, no matter when they may have been active, would understand more about this way of thinking in loops, backward and forward at the same time, about meandering through history?

The exhibition consists of five large-scale installations by Nikita Kadan, Barbara Kapusta, Frida Orupabo, Lisl Ponger, and Anita Witek, which enter into a dialogue with works of classical modernism they have selected from the mumok collection. As their own artworks are also part of the collection, these contemporaries continue to write the history of the museum and the history of contemporary art. In the exhibition, urgent questions of our time are mirrored in historical manifestations of themselves, which, in turn, point from an already past present to a still indefinite future.

With works by Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Karl Blossfeldt, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brâncuși, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Henri Florence, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, George Grosz, Raul Hausmann, Johannes Itten, Friedrich Kiesler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fernand Léger, René Magritte, Alicia Penalba, Antoine Pevsner, Man Ray, Germaine Richier, Alexander Michailowitsch Rodtschenko, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters, Victor Servranckx, Nicola Vučo, Fritz Wotruba and many more

Curated by Franz Thalmair in collaboration with Nikita Kadan, Barbara Kapusta, Frida Orupabo, Lisl Ponger, and Anita Witek

* Karin Harrasser, “As reality creates itself, unforeseeable and new, its image reflects behind it into the indefinite past.” in: Kunstraum Lakeside — Recherche | Research, ed. Franz Thalmair, trans. Peter Blakeney and Christine Schöffler (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2019), p. 17.

Opening: May 22, 2025, 7 pm

Hans Bellmer, La Bouche / The Mouth, 1935. 16 x 16 cm. Silberbromidabzug, koloriert / Silver-bromide print, colored mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, erworben / acquired in 1978 © Bildrecht, Wien 2025

Berlin-based artist, film maker, and author Hito Steyerl (* 1966) highlights social processes evoked by latest technology and develops interdisciplinary works in the focus of fine arts.

At the same time, she analyses the interpretation of reality and illuminates the socio-political relevance of current discussions.

In her first solo exhibition in Vienna titled Der Menschheit ist die Kugel bei einem Ohr hinein und beim anderen herausgeflogen [Humanity Had the Bullet Go In Through One Ear and Out Through the Other] (by Karl Kraus, Nachts [At Night], 1918), Steyerl uncovers the structures of political dimensions in everyday and pop culture.

Der Menschheit ist die Kugel bei einem Ohr hinein und beim anderen herausgeflogen Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016 Videoinstallation (Edition 6/7) MAK Contemporary © kunst-dokumentation.com/MAK

Fritz Wotruba, Large Reclining Figure, 1951–53 Belvedere, Vienna, 2019 Permanent loan Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, Photo: Harald Eisenberger / Belvedere, Vienna

Ferdinand Hodler, Blick ins Unendliche III, 1903/04 © Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Erworben 1994, Foto: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne
In the late 19th century, criticism of the materialism of industrialized society began to emerge. Many sought a new, nature-oriented way of life. Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings were avidly read, and Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal was interpreted as a pacifist manifesto. The “painter prince” Hans Makart depicted scenes from the Ring des Nibelungen. Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach—a devoted admirer of Wagner, artist-prophet, and nudist—founded a rural commune near Vienna in 1897. The Vienna Secessionists embraced Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).

For the first time in Vienna, a major exhibition examines the search for the “New Human” without ignoring the darker aspects of magical thinking. In this sense, the project Hidden Modernism also contributes to a critique of the present.

Ferdinand Hodler, Blick ins Unendliche III, 1903/04 © Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. Erworben 1994, Foto: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne

What if architecture were not an instrument of capital? The exhibition “Abundance Not Capital” presents the work of Indian-born architect Anupama Kundoo as a manifesto for a different kind of architecture. Using local resources, Kundoo designs buildings of extraordinary beauty that care for people and the planet.

Nature and labor are being exploited by the construction industry worldwide. At the same time, many people can no longer afford their homes. How did building become so destructive, and what can architects do to counteract this? In Anupama Kundoo‘s projects, wealth lies not in precious materials and perfected industrial products, but in the innovative use of locally abundant resources. Her projects are constructed knowledge for a new relationship between time, money, and materials. The exhibition enables Kundoo’s lively architecture to be experienced sensually and is a call for doing architecture otherwise.

In the companion volume “Abundance Not Capital. The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo”, Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny explore the path of „abundance“ as a resistance against „never enough.“ Essays by international authors contextualize Kundoo‘s work. The MIT Press, 2025.

Dachkonstruktionen aus Terrakotta-Elementen sparen Stahl und Zement. Anupama Kundoo: Wall House, Auroville, 2000 © Foto: Javier Callejas

METABOLICA leads into the “factory of life” and, in five chapters, tells a molecular story of metabolic cycles—from the Industrial Revolution to future scenarios of the bioeconomy. Algae and bacteria become artistic collaborators, using microbiological processes to establish a new aesthetic practice in which “metaboles” do not merely represent but actively perform real processes.
 

Bacteria act as sculptural agents by metabolizing algae-derived fatty acids into the bioplastic PHB. Replacing both quarry and chisel, they generate the sculptural material, transform it through digestion, and return it to the metabolic cycle.
 

Conceived in 2017 and supported by scientists and engineers since 2020, the project aims to use carbon from industrial and wastewater streams to produce PHB—a fully biodegradable alternative to petrochemical plastics and a model for a bioeconomic transition.

Ausstellungsansicht METABOLICA – Thomas Feuerstein, MQ Freiraum © Atelier Feuerstein / Bildrecht Wien, 2025, Courtesy: Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck Wien

The exhibition Die Linie explores the line as a fundamental element of the visual arts, following Wassily Kandinsky’s idea of its continual liberation from the instrument toward free expression.
 
Moving between subjective gesture and constructive precision, the line unfolds its many functions: it structures and connects, demarcates and opens up space, and describes reality and imagination, time and movement.
Starting from the classical medium of drawing, the exhibition demonstrates how artists create different “worlds of the line,” extending it far beyond traditional media boundaries into space. The focus is on contemporary positions that use the line as an open, experimental, and reflective medium to respond to social, political, and societal questions of our present.
 
The exhibition also features artists such as Angela Bulloch, Rosemarie Castoro, Jeanne-Claude, Carola Dertnig, Amy Feldman, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Birgit Jürgenssen, Reena Saini Kallat, Brigitte Kowanz, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnár, Helga Philipp, Giulia Piscitelli, Sonia Sanoja, and Chiharu Shiota.
 

Carola Derting, Strangers, 2003 © the artist

Born in Linz in 1971, Tobias Pils is among the most exciting painters working today. Employing a heavily reduced color palette, he creates paintings and drawings that weave abstract and representational elements into associative pictorial worlds. What in terms of subject matter can be interpreted as an investigation of both elementary and personal themes like birth and death or becoming and passing, also negotiates central questions in painting at large. For in Pils’ visual cosmos, one painterly mark leads to the next, one image to another, as if painting were constantly staging its own death and rebirth.

Tobias Pils lives and works in Vienna.

Curated by Manuela Ammer

Tobias Pils, Geist, 2024. Öl auf Leinwand / oil on canvas. 150 x 180 cm Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Photo: Jorit Aust © Tobias Pils

The book as an artistic medium plays a central role in the work of Louise Bourgeois, Heinz Gappmayr, Sol Lewitt, Rosemarie Trockel, as well as many contemporary young artists in the Austrian and international scene.

Books are used as instruments to design poetic visions and to expand concept art. The artists’ books in this exhibition initiate dialogues about gender roles and socio-political questions. At the same time, books are a form of cultural memory and commemoration. Young artists experiment with the medium of the book and transcend traditional boundaries of image, text, and material–against the backdrop of the digital world. In the exhibition, visitors can take different positions to leaf through and read books with the help of a specially developed, expansive display.

Heinz Frank, Kinderbuch für Architekten, 1993. © MAK

Work shapes the greater part of human life. It structures everyday routines, time, and social relationships, while also determining material security and social participation. In a present marked by economic crises, global inequality, and profound transformations of the working world, engagement with the topic of work has gained new urgency. Platform labor, automation, artificial intelligence, migration, the care crisis, and social precarity are challenging established ideas and certainties.
 
The exhibition Alles in Arbeit at the Dom Museum Wien creates a space in which diverse perspectives and artistic approaches come together. At its core is the human struggle with wage labor—its necessity, meaning, burden, and potential for shaping life. At the same time, the works on view question and expand conventional definitions of work by addressing invisible, unpaid, or marginalized forms of labor, including care and domestic work, artistic production, protest, and procrastination.

See Red Women’s Workshop, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, 1974. © See Red Women’s Workshop.

Long before the mind can grasp it, the body senses when something is out of balance. Digestion and metabolism are vital processes that shape not only the human organism but also the ecological cycles of our planet. The Belly Knows Before the Brain therefore understands metabolism not merely as a human bodily function, but as an ecological practice shared by many species.
 

The exhibition responds to ecological crises such as disrupted nutrient cycles, soil degradation, and the overexploitation of finite resources. It questions societal attitudes toward compost and decay, understanding decomposition not as a threat but as the foundation of new life.
 

Conceived as a site-specific installation, the exhibition takes the form of a “belly of the universe”: a sensorial space in which sculptures, textile objects, and a growing compost heap make collective processes of digestion, care, and transformation tangible. The result is a living system between kitchen, compost, and multispecies community, inviting visitors to trust the knowledge of the body, the intelligence of microbes, and the productive power of decay.

Fuzzy Earth. © KunstHausWien, Iris Ranzinger

BLACK JEWS, WHITE JEWS?

What skin colours do Jewish people have – and what colours are attributed to them, and how do they perceive themselves?

The exhibition ‘Black Jews, White Jews?’ explores these questions and presents historical and contemporary examples of how Jews are perceived by others and how they perceive themselves. It examines the topic of Jewish identity in the context of the tension between self-definition, anti-Semitism and racism.
The various answers reinforce the topicality and urgency of this exhibition.

The exhibition DU SOLLST DIR EIN BILD MACHEN explores the imaginative power of religious experience, its visual expression within the Christian tradition, and its reinterpretation by contemporary artists.
 

It presents works by artists who approach Christian iconography with both critical and affectionate perspectives, as well as with humor and feminist awareness, thereby opening up new ways of seeing motifs that have been passed down over centuries. Rather than aiming for overt provocation or loud protest, the exhibition emphasizes a nuanced perspective, the search for common ground, and the promotion of dialogue between contemporary art and religion.
 

Both religion and art are fundamental aspects of human existence, engaging with essential questions of meaning, the world, and our being. Religion renders the unfamiliar familiar, while art often confronts the familiar world with something unfamiliar. Church and art are also connected through the irrational, the mysterious, and above all through imagination—the capacity to create worlds with their own rules and laws, worlds that in turn reflect back on our lives and tell us something about our existence. The exhibition DU SOLLST DIR EIN BILD MACHEN makes visible a rich diversity of such imagined worlds.

Julia Krahn, Vater und Tochter, 2012. Analoge Fotografie, Farbdruck auf Aluminium, Courtesy KULTUM – Zentrum für Gegenwart, Kunst und Religion, Graz.

Lisette Model (1901–1983), born into a Viennese family with Jewish roots, is regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The exhibition at the ALBERTINA is the most comprehensive presentation of her work in Austria to date, bringing together key bodies of work from 1933 to 1959. Alongside iconic photographs such as Bathing at Coney Island and Singer at the Metropole Café, the exhibition also features rarely shown works.

After initially pursuing a musical education, Model turned to photography in France in the mid-1920s. Her 1934 portrait series of wealthy leisure seekers in Nice caused a sensation with its uncompromising social critique. Following her emigration to New York in 1938, she quickly established herself as a sought-after freelance photographer for influential magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. In powerful images, she captured the contrasts of urban life—from the poverty of the Lower East Side to the pastimes of the upper class and the vibrant nightlife of bars and jazz clubs.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Model produced major bodies of work outside New York, including on the US West Coast and in Venezuela, characterized by a melancholic and somber atmosphere. During the McCarthy era, she increasingly turned to teaching. In 1979, her first monograph was published by Aperture; the exhibition presents the original design of this now classic photobook for the first time.

Lisette Model, Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York City, 1940–46 ALBERTINA, Vienna. © 2025 Estate of Lisette Model. Courtesy Baudoin Lebon

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz opens the winter program and presents works by Jonida Laçi and Luīze Nežberte, the recipients of the 2025 Kunsthalle Wien Prize.

Revised versions of their diploma projects are shown alongside new, site-specific works. Both artists work with sculpture, installation, video, and photography, yet pursue distinct approaches that are deliberately brought into dialogue within the exhibition.
 
Jonida Laçi explores perception, points of view, and modes of representation, as well as the social and economic inscriptions embedded in materials and images.
 
Luīze Nežberte engages with architecture, cultural memory, and historical narratives, translating these into sculptural installations using contemporary building materials.
 
Through the interplay of their works, spaces emerge that guide movement, sightlines, and perspectives, questioning how meaning, memory, and history are continually reconstructed through material and spatial processes of translation.

© Kunsthalle Wien Preis 2025. Jonida Laçi & Luīze Nežberte Exhibition, Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, 7.11.2025–25.1.2026

The Kunsthalle Wien presents a major institutional survey of Richard Hawkins for the first time in Austria and his first such exhibition in over a decade. The exhibition brings together more than 100 works from nine series produced over the past three decades, including paintings, collages, sculptures, and videos.

Hawkins’s practice is grounded in desire and the pleasure of looking and is shaped by a highly referential collage-based approach that weaves together art history, literature, theater, and popular culture. The exhibition traces his often obsessive engagement with subjects such as ancient sculpture, subcultures, artists’ biographies, and internet memes. It spans early image collages, ceramic works, and acrylic paintings through to AI-processed videos described as “queer exorcisms.” Complementing these works, Hawkins uses large-scale wallpapers made from enlarged images to layer and juxtapose different phases of his practice.

Key bodies of work include a dark reimagining of the biblical story of Salome; studies of artists such as Tatsumi Hijikata, Antonin Artaud, and Forrest Bess; and more recent, vividly colored paintings of Hollywood stars. The latter combine paparazzi photographs with art-historical references, notably to Pierre Bonnard.

Richard Hawkins: Potentialities is organized in cooperation with the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, where the exhibition will be shown from late April 2026.

Installation view Richard Hawkins: Potentialities, Kunsthalle Wien 2025

In Soft Zeros, Mimi Ọnụọha examines how algorithms, archives, and power structures shape visibility and forgetting. The concept of the “soft zero” refers to an apparent absence in data that signifies not nonexistence but systematic exclusion and politically produced voids, revealing how dominant knowledge systems are reinforced while other perspectives are erased.
 
At the center of the exhibition is the film Ground Truths (2025), which reflects on an attempt to use AI to identify possible mass graves in Texas and points to the history of the Sugar Land 95—the remains of 95 Black individuals discovered in 2018, exposing the continuity between slavery, the convict-leasing system, and today’s prison industry.
 
Additional works address denial, responsibility, and collective forgetting. Soft Zeros makes visible what has been deliberately buried and reminds us that what is suppressed can always resurface.

Mimi Onuoha, Soft Zeros, Installation view, Secession 2025. Photo: Sophie Pölzl

From 2 December 2025, the Kunsthistorisches Museum will present the special exhibition Chinese Art from the Forbidden City in the Gold Cabinet of the Kunstkammer. Curated jointly by the Palace Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the exhibition brings together 76 outstanding masterpieces that offer insight into the aesthetics of Chinese court life in the eighteenth century. Through artistic expressions of power, culture, and ideals of life, the exhibition highlights both parallels and differences between East and West in comparable historical periods.
 

Most of the works on view—including imperial jade carvings and precious porcelain objects—will be shown in Europe for the first time. At the heart of the exhibition is a finely crafted ruyi scepter made of gilded bronze with triple jade inlay, exemplifying the extraordinary virtuosity of Chinese filigree work while symbolizing “good fortune and blessing.” Under this guiding motif, the exhibition also marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Austria in 2026.
 

Centered on the theme Harmony in Diversity, the exhibition presents the virtuosity of eighteenth-century Chinese court art and craftsmanship. Objects made from precious materials such as jade, porcelain, lacquer, enamel, and clocks illustrate the aesthetic philosophy of the imperial court, where scholarly art, decorative objects, and functional works served to convey ideals and values through material form.

Teekanne mit kaiserlichem Gedicht Teapot with Imperial Poem Height: 12.7 cm; diameter: 6.3 cm (rim), 7 cm (base) © The Palace Museum

Claudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer, and writer. With the means of language, movement and music, their own body and other choreographed bodies, the artist explores topics such as social hierarchies, a sense of belonging, queer body economies, and desire.

At mumok, Claudia Pagès Rabal will present a new commissioned work in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery in London and developed in collaboration with Tractora Koop in Bilbao. Continuing their research into the Iberian Peninsula during the al-Andalus era—the Arabic name for lands under Muslim rule between 711 and 1492—Pagès focuses on fortifications of inner Catalonia. Five defense towers erected at the heart of the political-military buffer zone in the so-called Hispanic March are the starting point for a video of choreographed dance, light, and sound sequences in which the artist conjures questions about national identity, the construction of political systems, and the legends attached to them.

Produced within the Call of “la Caixa” Foundation Support for Creation’24. Production.

Curated by Franz Thalmair

Opening: December 3, 2025, 7 pm

Claudia Pagès Rabal, production image, 2024. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist

Centering on Helmut Lang’s vision of design and identity between 1986 and 2005, the exhibition highlights Lang’s role as a pioneer who embraced artistic strategies long before he departed from the fashion industry in 2005 to focus on his art practice.

With a radically intermedia approach, Helmut Lang shattered traditional norms and set new standards for clothing, graphic design, staging, architecture, experimental branding, interdisciplinary collaboration, and digital communication with uncompromising foresight. In 1998 Lang became the first designer to stream a runway show online, anticipating the global shift in how fashion would be experienced. Simultaneously, he launched over 1,000 taxi-top ads to promote the new website, becoming a landmark feature of New York City.

Lang’s work was defined not just as clothing, but as a medium of communication and part of a larger cultural narrative. His fashion presentations, known as “Séance de Travail” (work session) as well as his flagship stores in New York and Paris were statements for a strategic rethinking that prioritized experience over mere consumption.

Through his collaborations with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jürgen Teller, and many others, he created a new visual language that redefined the boundaries between creative disciplines, cementing his role and legacy in fashion and culture until today.

The exhibition offers an unprecedented insight into the visionary designer and artist’s mindset. It forgoes the display of physical garments in favor of a contemporary, mixed media presentation featuring large-scale, site-specific installations as well as selected original materials from both the MAK Helmut Lang Archive and the artist’s own archive.

CURATOR:
Marlies Wirth, Curator Digital Culture and Design Collection

RESEARCH COLLABORATION:
Lara Steinhäußer, Curator, MAK Textiles and Carpets Collection

© MAK/Christian Mendez; © HL-ART