Fatima Hellberg Sets a June Opening Program at Vienna’s mumok, Led by Kate Millett’s “Terminal Piece”
Vienna’s Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) is preparing for a new chapter this summer. Fatima Hellberg, the institution’s newly appointed director general, has laid out an opening sequence of exhibitions and collection interventions set to launch in June, beginning with a newly acquired 1972 installation by American artist and writer Kate Millett (1934–2017).
At the center of Hellberg’s first program is “Terminal Piece,” which will serve as an anchor for mumok’s collection display. The June rollout also includes an installation by German scenographer and costume designer Anna Viebrock (b. 1951), and a multifaceted project by Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili (b. 1979) that will function simultaneously as an exhibition, an open studio, and an event space.
Taken together, the trio signals a curatorial direction that is less about novelty as a standalone value than about how artworks accumulate meaning over time — and how a museum might make that accumulation legible without flattening it.
Hellberg has described the museum’s mandate as a balancing act between two impulses that can easily collide: preservation and activation. Museums, she argues, are charged with caring for the past — keeping works intact and extending their lives beyond the conditions that produced them. Yet they are also responsible for returning artworks to the present, reintroducing them as living propositions rather than sealed historical artifacts.
That push and pull, in her view, is not a problem to be solved so much as a productive tension to be managed. If a museum leans too far toward “aliveness,” the demands of display and use can undermine conservation. If it leans too far toward protection, the work risks becoming inaccessible, cut off from the world it might still address.
Hellberg’s thinking aligns with a founding idea at mumok. In the context of announcing her program, she has pointed to a statement by Werner Hofmann (1922–2010), the museum’s founder, who argued for “the courage to place the monument alongside the document, the masterpiece alongside the as-yet unconfirmed phenomenon of its time.” The line sketches a museum model that refuses a single hierarchy of value, allowing canonical works and emergent forms to share the same institutional frame.
For Hellberg, the question is whether museum spaces can “hold complexity” — not only in the sense of accommodating different media and scales, but in sustaining contradiction, uncertainty, and process. Rather than treating exhibitions as vehicles for a fixed message, she has emphasized curiosity as an operating principle: a willingness to let artworks remain unresolved, and to let viewers encounter them through the intelligence of the senses as much as through explanatory discourse.
Her approach also suggests a renewed interest in continuity with history. Instead of chasing the new for its own sake, Hellberg has argued for attending to the persistence of certain narratives — not as repetition, but as evidence of their density and power. In that framework, the museum becomes a place where the present is not isolated from what came before, but sharpened by it.
The June program will be the first public test of that vision at mumok, a museum long identified with the shifting definitions of modern and contemporary art. With Millett’s “Terminal Piece” positioned as a structural anchor, and with Viebrock and Astakhishvili bringing distinct approaches to staging, space, and lived production, Hellberg’s opening sequence points toward a museum that treats boundaries — between past and present, care and exposure, monument and document — as the very material of its work.
As mumok moves into this new phase, the institution’s challenge will be familiar to many museums: how to protect what it holds while keeping it permeable to the world outside its walls. Hellberg’s early answer is to embrace that ambivalence, and to build a program that makes room for complexity rather than smoothing it away.
