Enjoy – the mumok Collection in Change
mumok, Wien
June 19, 2021 – April 18, 2022

Ten years after Museum of Desires, her inaugural exhibition at mumok, Karola Kraus is organizing with her team a collection presentation that showcases central donations and acquisitions from the past decade in order to shed new light on the collections development. This exhibition, following twenty years after mumok opened in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier and forty years after the founding of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, is both a survey of the past and a glimpse ahead to the future. As past years are reviewed, new perspectives are proposed as basis for the museum’s future collection and exhibition activities.

The presentation sets out to convey art history since modernism as a living process reflecting ever-changing socio-political, socio-cultural, and philosophical developments and discourses. The exhibition title Enjoy quotes a motif from a poster series by Corita Kent (Sister Corita), who appropriated and repurposed texts and images from consumer and popular culture, art, politics and religion in her works. Such breaks with tradition and convention form a central leitmotif of the show.

Following a loose chronological sequence from classical modernism to the neoavant-garde art movements of the 1960s and 70s and onward to contemporary art, the presentation traces key themes across time and media: it demonstrates the influence of social and scientific developments on modern art as well as their relationship to contemporary art, it takes an expanded and critically ironic look at Pop Art, it explores the potential of Conceptual and performance art since the 1960s with their references to the body and to nature, and it also turns its attention to current questions regarding migration and the drawing of borders.

more. www.mumok.at