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

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

An event organized by Basement.

In its final exhibition of 2025, basement (on the move) presents works by German artist Ulrike Donié and Vienna-based Annika Eschmann at puuul in 1080 Vienna. Under this year’s theme “Transitions – Reality or Fiction”, the participating artists explore the question of how reality is constructed in very different ways. Both artists share an interest in artistic research and systems. Where do their approaches intersect? How do our words and thoughts shape what we perceive as reality? And conversely, how do images and objects we experience with our senses influence the terms we use to describe our world?

Annika Eschmann’s work “Line 66–75” is a recording system consisting of drawings on paper that change in parallel with their own development, shaped by experience and learning. The drawings follow two constant parameters or conditions: each is made using a single line, and the line must not intersect itself.

In Ulrike Donié’s work “Cycles”, the emergence and development of life is juxtaposed with dissolution and decay. Water reflections, pond biotopes, jungles, and organic or animal-like forms are staged as archetypes in order to depict the primal nature of these events as an eternal process.

Annika Eschmann Iron Curtain of Economy of Attention and Metamorphosis, 2025 Detail Rolle, Zeichnung ©Annika Eschmann

GLIMPSES: The Intergenerationality of Identity is a multidisciplinary art project, exhibition series, and dialogue platform unfolding from spring to fall 2025 at eindorf in Vienna.

GLIMPSES brings together seven international artists — Paula Flores, Louise Deininger, Maria Gomar Vidal, Bettina Eigner, Rafael Lippuner, Guadalupe Aldrete, and Nina Sandino — whose works explore identity, memory, and cultural heritage through installations, paintings, performances, photography, and video. The project reflects on how knowledge, inherited experience, resilience, and belonging are passed through generations and embodied in personal and collective practices.

At its core, GLIMPSES examines the intergenerational transmission of identity: How do we carry our histories? What stories do we choose to remember, and which ones do we transform? The series opens a space for pluricultural dialogue — a shared reflection on heritage, cultural memory, and ancestral ties — and considers how these threads shape who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

GLIMPSES: The Intergenerationality of Identity is a project by Ancestral Synonyms, eindorf, and KASAL.

Initiated and curated by Guadalupe Aldrete.

Funded by MA7 – Department of Culture of the City of Vienna & the 15th District.

ABOUT PAULA FLORES’ PARTICIPATION:

Night Whispers
by Paula Flores (Austria/Mexico)
Opening:November 5th at 19:00

In Night Whispers, Paula Flores creates a living installation that evolves over time through the life cycle of mushrooms and their mycelium. Engaging with concepts of growth, decay, and regeneration, the work reflects on ancestral knowledge and forgotten ecological respect. Through this organic material and a sonic collaboration with composer Citlali Gomez, Flores reimagines memory not as something static, but as something alive — shifting, decomposing, and transforming.

Her approach resonates deeply with the concerns of GLIMPSES: The Intergenerationality of Identity, as it draws attention to the ways in which identity and legacy are embedded not only in human relationships, but in our entanglement with the natural world. By challenging anthropocentric views, Night Whispers reminds us that ancestral memory may live just as much in fungi and soil as in family stories or cultural rituals.

credit: Paula Flores

Foto Credits: Simon Veres

What skin colours do Jewish people have – and what skin colours are attributed to them? 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.
 
For centuries, racist worldviews have judged people primarily by their skin colour. ‘Race theories,’ colonialism, anti-Semitism, and other fantasies of superiority created a hierarchy of people: a world order based on skin colour. The exhibition focuses on these stereotypes and exclusions experienced by Jews of colour worldwide – especially in Europe, the USA, and Israel.
 
Contemporary discourse understands skin colour as a historical and social construct rather than a biological category. The recent escalation of the Middle East conflict in particular has led to the reinforcement of the stereotype of Jews as white colonial masters oppressing a ‘non-white’ indigenous population. This ignores the fact that Jews have been and continue to be present on all continents, not least because their history is marked by migration, expulsion and, above all, the Shoah.
 
But are Jews white, ‘non-white’ or black?

Jason Bard Yarmosky, Portrait of a young man, 2018 © Privatsammlung, Europa

egorlovki.com

© Egor Lovki / Bildrecht, Vienna 2025

WERKSCHAU XXX is the continuation of the annual exhibition series by FOTOGALERIE WIEN, which presents contemporary artists who have made a significant contribution to the development of artistic photography and new media in Austria.

We are delighted to present Vienna-based artist SIGRID KURZ at our 30th WERKSCHAU ANNIVERSARY.

Sigrid Kurz’ works are characteristic of the transformation that artistic practice underwent at the end of the 20th century, when artists fundamentally expanded their field of activity, overturned traditional boundaries between work and the art world, focused on artistic research, and became “discursive.” Even in her earliest photographic series, she observed these “parameters that determine the institution of art” (Astrid Wege), the fields of action and role models, the “working and representation conditions,” and the politically charged spaces of galleries.

A single photograph from 1991 serves as a metaphor for the often mysterious games that are played out in these fields of art. A PLAYING FIELD in front of an urban backdrop is prepared for potential players. But before they are granted access, they must know the official and unofficial rules and prove their skills.

Sigrid Kurz is familiar with all the rules of the game and, as an astute observer, consumes its changing and increasingly immersive offerings. She attentively explores cities, scours the playing fields of art and cinema, observes formal and social changes, registers the attitudes of the actors or their understatement, and authentically documents the conditions and sensitivities. She always considers her own character and her own moves on the playing field, including her curiosity about the viewers, whom she has been addressing directly since 1998 in the series FRAGEN (QUESTIONS), urging them to take a stand.

From 2014 onwards, she responded to the fact that expectations regarding the presentation of art were changing: Instead of being statically representative, it should be permeated by performative, processual, and interactive forms. With a simple gesture—Kurz turns the image of the exhibition space upside down—she transforms the ceiling lights into stage spotlights on EXPERIMENTAL SETS. Under her direction, futuristic luminous platforms are created on which transformations of all kinds could take place. Since 2021 (CLOSE UP), she has taken on yet another new perspective, in which she herself becomes noticeable as an observer and photographer. Above all, her presence is expressed indirectly through the movement of her body.

Sigrid Kurz takes us onto the playing fields of art, here and now, with a glance back at history. The palindrome “here we are we here” is both a statement and a question, hinting not least at the competitive atmosphere that prevails on the playing field of art. (Ruth Horak)

Opening and catalog presentation:

Monday, October 20, 2025, 7:00 p.m.

Introductory remarks: Ruth Horak

In cooperation with VIENNA ART WEEK:

Artist talk with Nela Eggenberger: Friday, November 7, 6 p.m.

Exhibition dates: October 21–November 22, 2025

Sigrid Kurz, TURNAROUND, 2014, C-Print, 45 x 60 cm, © Sigrid Kurz, Bildrecht Wien

Max Freund is not satisfied with just one way of expression: he draws, paints, sews and collages. At the same time, he runs a publishing house together with friends, in which his interest for graphic print comes to show. In his work, figurative painting meets abstract shapes, and both are equally important to him. His inspirations come from music and literature, as he translates their rhythms into art.

In its project space on Franz-Josefs-Kai, Collectors Agenda is showing abstract haptic works by Max Freund that have not been on exhibit before, as well as an installation sculpture made of fabric.

Opening: October 14 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Fotos: Maximilian Pramatarov

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

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. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna & Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Photo: Jorit Aust©Tobias Pils

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.

© Photograph: Javier Callejas

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

Brigitte Kowanz Matter of Time, 2019 ESTATE BRIGITTE KOWANZ © Estate Brigitte Kowanz / Bildrecht, Vienna 2025 Photo: Stefan Altenburger

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

A major new exhibition by Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) is installed across the first floor of the Kunsthalle’s Museumsquartier building. The exhibition presents an entirely new body of commissioned work including installation, photography and video for which Mahama draws upon the material legacy of colonialism, post-colonialism and industrialisation in Ghana. It is Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Mahama’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien develops his research on the history of the Ghanaian railway network, first created under British colonial rule during the 1890s. It sees the fulfilment of a long-term aspiration to deconstruct, transport and exhibit a full-size diesel locomotive (one of several British- and German-built trains that Mahama has acquired since 2022). The mechanisms, vessels and networks employed in transporting goods and people are the starting point for a series of works that consider the act of loading, carrying and unloading weight alongside a more abstract notion of the weight of history. Remnants of the railway, an industrial system for transport and trade, are combined with objects and images that refer to the physical act of bearing weight with the body. The centrepiece to the exhibition is an installation that employs a multitude of enamelled iron ‘headpans’ to act as a support for a locomotive.

The pans are a commonplace vessel used in Ghana to carry goods and materials. Mahama amassed a collection of thousands of used pans, exchanging new for old. Chipped, rusted, dented and torn, the objects evidence heavy use. Stacked underneath the train, they bear a locomotive that can be seen as another kind of vessel.

An accompanying series of photographic works consider the damage inflicted upon the human body by the daily activity of carrying the headpans. These include over 100 X-ray images of spinal deformation that are framed within a metal scaffold removed from the train. At once a symbol of and a system for colonial and capitalist extraction, Mahama’s critique figures the railway as an infrastructure that was literally built on the backs of Ghanaian people.

Biography

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) has held exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (2025); Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Barbican Centre, London (both 2024); Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2023); Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2022); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020); The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Norval Foundation, Cape Town (both 2019); Tel Aviv Art Museum (2016) and K.N.U.S.T Museum, Kumasi (2013). His work has also been exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); the 18th Biennale Architettura, Venice (2023); the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); the 58th and 56th Biennale Arte, Venice (2019 and 2015) and at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). He was the Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2023) and is the recipient of the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the Dia Art Foundation. Mahama lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale where he has founded several artist-led community initiatives including Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in 2019, Redclay in 2020 and, most recently, Nkrumah Volini (all in Tamale).

Edition

On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Austria, Ibrahim Mahama has created a limited-edition print, the proceeds of which will entirely support Kunsthalle Wien’s programme.

Ibrahim Mahama: Zilijifa, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien, Courtesy Redclay; Ibrahim Mahama & White Cube, photo: Markus Wörgötter

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

mumok is presenting the first solo museum exhibition of Japanese artist Kazuna Taguchi, who has been living in Vienna since 2013. Taguchi’s meticulously composed monochrome photographs convey body fragments, gestures, and gazes that resonate with the surrealist tradition concerning the questioning of the photographic representation of the female body. This can be moments of the phantomic or Yūgen*-like, images that capture a figure in a state between appearance and disappearance.

Taguchi’s works are based on an analog and hands-on approach at the intersection of painting and photography: In an intricate process, the artist combines various visual sources that she paints only to photograph them in various environments and setting that suit the attributes of each painting, and ultimately incorporates elements of chance while manipulating the prints in the darkroom. Taguchi compares the multiple layers and repeated interventions that lead to a permeation of myriad textures, time planes, and narrative spaces to the work of a painter who keeps tirelessly returning to her easel and brush.

*According to the Japanese poet Kamo no Chomei (1155—1216), yūgen is a feeling that is not openly expressed in words, but symbolically indicated by images.

Curated by Heike Eipeldauer

Opening: June 12, 2025, 7 pm

Kazuna Taguchi, The eyes of Eurydice #23, 2019. Gelatin Silver Print 16,6 x 12,1 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Exhibition on display at the public exhibition space ‘Schauraum’ on the street on Berggasse 19.

Daniel Hafner’s artistic practice, long characterized by the use of diverse mediums, increasingly focuses on the potential of artistic action. The installation “Modern People” is intrinsically linked to a performance of the same name, which Hafner has staged with fellow artists at various locations. Their filmic recordings form a fundamental component of this spatial composition.

The concept is directed towards exploring public spaces: Their landscapes and objects – both techno-industrial and botanical – provide an impetus to engage with encountered realities and come to terms with them. In doing so, the performers follow instructions inscribed as symbols on stones and leaves. The resulting (inter)actions represent delicate, quiet, and mindful examinations and redefinitions of our surroundings.
They often recall mundane, routine actions guided by the world of objects.

Credit: Daniel Hafner, Modern People Vienna, 2021, Photo: Reinhold Zisser

Burn The Diaries, Read Them Out Loud is an exhibition incorporating a programme of performance, readings, discussions and exchange with a focus on text in the field of contemporary art. Conceived as a group exhibition in progress, artworks installed at its inception will be in dialogue with numerous performative interventions taking place at and around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz over a course of four months. Looking closely at the practice of annotating, editing and writing in art, the format of the exhibition considers text as the framework for or ‘skeleton’ of artmaking – expanding its status beyond the preliminary note. The exhibition serves as a page upon which artworks and performances are inscribed as interrelated notes – sampling, (mis)quoting and rehearsing themselves and one another.

Artists employing text in their work have been invited to use the exhibition as a space for production and experimentation. A display that artist Ian Waelder conceived in conversation with the artists, curator and institution, forms a setting ready for interaction, as well as a site for reference and meeting that quite literally punctuates the space.

Artists

Anahita Asadifar, Sanna Helena Berger, Lara Dâmaso, Joshua Leon, Ville Laurinkoski, Prosopopoeia, Rietlanden Women’s Office, Lisa Robertson, Shanzhai Lyric, Miriam Stoney, Ian Waelder und Eleanor Ivory Weber

Programme

Thursday, 5 June, 19:00
Opening with a performance by Ville Laurinkoski

Saturday, 14 June, 16:00
Performance by Lara Dâmaso

Thursday, 3 July, 18:00
Performance by Eleanor Ivory Weber and Cassandra Seltman

Thursday, 4 September, 18:00
Performance by Sanna Helena Berger

Sunday, 14 September, 14:00
Workshop by Anahita Asadifar and Sam Dolbear

Saturday, 20 September, 14:00
Workshop with Prosopopoeia hosted by Inga Charlotte Thiele

Thursday, 25 September, 18:00
Lecture and Conversation by Lisa Robertson

Thursday, 16 October, 18:00
Reading by Miriam Stoney

Saturday, 18 October, 16:00
Performance by Shanzhai Lyric

Sunday, 19 October, 14:00
Conversation and Reading by Joshua Leon

Performance: Lara Dâmaso: exercise in facelessness (public), Kunsthalle Wien 2025, photo: Paola Lesslhumer

In the final years of his life, artist-architect Frederick Kiesler worked on a collection of diary-like notes, anecdotes, and travel reports, complemented by poems and reflections on architecture and art. Due to Kiesler’s death in December 1965, the book project remained unfinished and was posthumously published by his widow Lillian Kiesler under the title Inside the Endless House. Art, People and Architecture. A Journal. Kiesler himself had chosen the working title The Endless Search.

The exhibition picks up on these ideas and takes the visitors on an “endless search”—or rather, an endless journey through Kiesler’s architecture and art, as well as to the companions who shaped his artistic network in New York.

Selected projects are presented through exemplary objects—from his most famous works, such as the Endless House, to his stage designs for the Juilliard School of Music, the Galaxy sculptures, and portrait drawings of his friends.
The exhibition also highlights the rich diversity of the Frederick Kiesler Foundation’s archive, encompassing a wide range of media types—including glass plate slides, diaries, small models, drawings, and personal documents, many of which have rarely or never been shown before.

© Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

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. mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, acquired in 1978 © Bildrecht, Wien 2025

In 2025, the Kokoschka Museum Pöchlarn is dedicating itself to Oskar Kokoschka’s decades of work as a teacher and his intensive involvement with educational issues. The exhibition spans a wide range from his first teaching experiences shortly after finishing his studies at the Vienna School of Applied Arts to his great, international successes as a teacher in the first post-war decades.

Kokoschka’s early work as a drawing teacher at Eugenie Schwarzwald’s private school in 1911 ended in a scandal – the school authorities had him dismissed. His teaching style seemed too unorthodox and not academic enough. The international success of his “School of Seeing”, founded in Salzburg in 1953, stands in stark contrast to this. Kokoschka’s teaching focused on the figurative depiction of moving models. The way he worked in his painting class and the tremendous impact of his personality became a formative experience for numerous students.

Oskar Kokoschka mit Schüler:innen der „Schule des Sehens“, Salzburg 1953–1955, Foto: F. Solms, Oskar Kokoschka Dokumentation P

Damien Hirst Beautiful Temporarily Lost At Sea Drawing, 2008 Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. Bildrecht, Wien 2025

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. Learning to fly, 1976. mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, acquired in 1980 © Maria Lassnig

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, Foto: Nora Meyer

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

© Architekturzentrum Wien, Sammlung