Is modernism an epoch? How did artists see this in the 1920s? Reading Time in Space answers these questions by referring to four exhibitions and book projects that constituted the first global presentations of modernism and raised key questions in their own time. These projects rested on new concepts of space and time. They include El Lissitzky’s und Hans Arp’s fictitious exhibition project of 1924 and Friedrich Kiesler’s legendary theater exhibition of the same year. In an installation by Nicole Six/Paul Petritsch, this mumok exhibition explores temporal and spatial coordinates whose parameters are constituted by elements of modernism. Referring to a time of upheaval in the arts, sciences, and society, the concept of modernism is an ongoing point of reference in the art history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as works by Werner Feiersinger, Andreas Fogarasi, and Ulrike Grossarth show.

We are showing works by Giacomo Balla, Willi Baumeister, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Florence Henri, Josef Hofmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Oskar Kokoschka, František Kupka, René Magritte, Oskar Schlemmer, Max Oppenheimer, Madame d’Ora, Pablo Picasso, Felice Rix, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp—and many more.