mumok Annual Press Conference 2016 Statement by the Directors

Transcription

1 mumok Annual Press Conference 2016 Statement by the Directors Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien Annual Press Conference 2016 January 20, 2016, 10 am Statement by Karola Kraus and Cornelia Lamprechter An overview of exhibitions in 2016 New acquisitions in 2015 Detailed exhibition program Press contact Karin Bellmann T karin.bellmann@mumok.at Katja Kulidzhanova T Fax press@mumok.at We have planned an ambitious program for the next few years, which combines three strands: the presentation of our own collection, exhibitions of outstanding international art, and the strengthening of the Austrian art and cultural scene. Our program includes both unique individual positions since modernism as in our retrospective of the work of Július Koller in the coming year and also complex thematic exhibitions that we see as our contribution to international discourse in art history such as our group show Painting 2.0, and also the ongoing review of our own collection, as we open our museum up to new generations. It remains a great challenge to continue to present a quality program of exhibitions and events and at the same time remain true to our commitment to expand our collection, while securing and gaining the necessary financial means. State budgets are far below our requirements, and it remains essential to enter into new cooperation agreements and find additional funding. We are particularly pleased that we have begun a new partnership with the Kapsch AG, a wonderful partner with whom this year we will present the first Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize for young artists living and working in Austria. In 2015 we were able to gain gifts to the value of more than 700,000 EUR, and also to expand this field of business with the mumok Editions of artists who were shown in the museum last year. Notwithstanding these great successes, we must emphasize that our essential work is threatened by the fact that our basic funding has not been increased not even in line with inflation for several years. The reserves that we have been able to establish will be exhausted over the next two years. If our basic funding is not increased, mumok will face a serious challenge to its ability to fulfil its cultural and political mission as a museum, and to maintain present structures. Karola Kraus, academic and artistic managing director, and Cornelia Lamprechter, business managing director 1 Press release, January 27, 2016

2 Preview: The Exhibition Year 2016 at mumok In 2016, mumok will begin the exhibition year with a new look at Vienna Actionism, by relating it to its no less radical predecessors from the early twentieth century. Through the summer months, Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age will show how painting since the 1960s has continually renewed itself. Following this, we will focus on an artists artist in our retrospective of the work of Július Koller. The year will also see exhibitions of younger artists Eloise Hawser and Kathi Hofer, and the duo Pakui Hardware. This year s presentation of the mumok s own collection will focus on two pioneers of modernism in Vienna, Werner Hofmann and Viktor Matejka, and then from November we will be offering an insight into the generous gifts given by the collectors Gertraud and Dieter Bogner. In 2016, the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize will be awarded for the first time through the Kapsch Contemporary Art Challenge. This prize is aimed at young artists living and working in Austria. The mumok kino will present a varied program with thematic film series, solo and new presentations, and numerous projects in cooperation. We kick off with a double opening on March 4, The exhibition Body, Psyche, and Taboo: Vienna Actionism and Early Vienna Modernism compares and contrasts actions by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler with works by their no less radical predecessors from Gustav Klimt to Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Koloman Moser, to Anton Romako, Max Oppenheimer, and Egon Schiele. At the same time, the museum s Level 2 is devoted to an encounter between the artists Eloise Hawser and Kathi Hofer. In their joint exhibition HAWSER / HOFER, they both take a critical and contemporary view of the concept of nostalgia. From June 4, the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age places our sustained interest in contemporary painting and the continuous expansion of digital technologies within a surprising historical context. This exhibition goes back to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s and shows how progressive painting was already then developing productive forms of crossover with mass culture and its media. From the arrival of television to the so-called internet revolution, painting has always succeeded in integrating the mechanisms that seemed to herald its own death. With more than two hundred artworks by more than one hundred artists, Painting 2.0 tells the story of painting from the 1960s to the present. In their first solo show in a museum in Austria, the artist duo Pakui Hardware transform mumok into an incubator for still unknown (hybrid) beings of the future. This is all inspired by science fiction films of the 1970s, and by synthetic biology, leading to Pakui Hardware s scenario of possible new lifeforms and lifestyles. From summer 2016, mumok s new presentation from its own collection, entitled We Pioneers: Trailblazers of Postwar Modernism, will explore the sustained influence of Werner Hofmann, founder director of the Museum of the 20th Century (today s 2 Press release, January 27, 2016

3 mumok), and of Viktor Matejka, Vienna s first postwar councilor for culture, looking at how these two men helped to open Austria up to modernist and contemporary art. On the invitation of mumok, collectors Getraud and Dieter Bogner, working together with curator Rainer Fuchs, will draw on the collection they have been donating to the museum since 2007 to present a new exhibition that focuses on the contents of these largely abstract and conceptual works. Entitled Construction_Reflection: Works from the Getraud and Dieter Bogner Collection at mumok, this will be on show from November 25, Toward the end of the exhibition year, we will present the first prize winners of the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize, on show from October 22, A month later, from November 25, 2016, mumok will be showing the hitherto largest retrospective of the work of Slovak artist Július Koller, presenting his entire oeuvre since the early 1960s. The three curators Daniel Grúň, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Georg Schöllhammer have undertaken the first comprehensive scholarly review of all the archive materials associated with Koller and his work, enabling a true appreciation of the artist s remarkable achievement. Retrospective: New Acquisitions 2015 Gifts and New Acquisitions from Devoted Funds In 2015, mumok was able to acquire installations, paintings, photographs, and film and videos by the following artists: Mladen Bizumic, Dara Birnbaum, Günter Brus, Carola Dertnig, DIE DAMEN, Ion Grigorescu, Julia Haller, Christian Hutzinger, Roland Kollnitz, David Lieske, Natalia LL, Christian Philipp Müller, Ulrike Müller, Nam June Paik, Dan Perjovschi, Laure Prouvost, Jörg Schlick, Thomas Stimm and Wolf Vostell. We would like to thank the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts, the Federal Chancellor s Office (Gallery Promotion), the mumok Board, and the Collectors Club for their support in the acquisition of artworks for the mumok collection. Thanks to generous gifts first and foremost by Gertraud and Dieter Bogner, the Baloise Group, Basler Versicherungen Österreich, Wolf Dieter Haupt, Marita Loosen Fox, Paul Maenz, Michael Merighi, Willi Missauer, and by artists, in 2015 our collection was permanently enhanced by 22 installations, objects, drawings, paintings, and photographs, as well as documentary and archive materials by the following artists: Fareed Armaly, Cosima von Bonin, Josef Dabernig, Gunter Damisch, Walter Eckert, Terry Fox, Stefan Gyrko, Herrmann, Orit Ishay, Nikita Kadan, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Christian Philipp Müller, Ulrike Müller, Tamuna Sirbiladze, John Skoog, Ernst Trawöger, Martin Walde, Peter Weibel, Lois Weinberger, Grete Yppen, and Heimo Zobernig. 3 Press release, January 27, 2016

4 Detailed Exhibition Program 2016 Body, Psyche, and Taboo Vienna Actionism and Early Vienna Modernism March 4, to May 16, 2016 Opening: March 3, 2016 HAWSER / HOFER March 4, to May 22, 2016 Opening: March 3, Press release, January 27, 2016

5 Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age June 4, to November 6, 2016 Opening: June 3, 2016 Pakui Hardware. Vanilla Eyes June 4, to October 9, 2016 Opening: June 3, 2016 Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2016 October 22, 2016 to January 28, Press release, January 27, 2016

6 Július Koller November 25, 2016 to April 18, 2017 Opening: November 24, 2016 Collection Presentations 2016 We Pioneers Trailblazers of Postwar Modernism May 12, 2016 to 5. March 5, 2017 Construction_Reflection Works from the Gertraud and Dieter Bogner Collection at mumok November 25, 2016 to April 18, 2017 Opening: November 24, Press release, January 27, 2016

7 Body, Psyche, and Taboo Vienna Actionism and Early Vienna Modernism March 4 to May 16, 2016 Press conference: March 2, 2016, 10 am Opening: March 3, 2016, 7 pm In 2016 mumok is taking a fresh look at one of the mainstays of our own collection Vienna Actionism by relating this to equally radical positions taken by some of its Austrian predecessors. Many Austrian museums and collections are supporting this project with generous loans of works, thus making it possible to create an encounter between artists from around the turn of the twentieth century and Vienna Actionists. The range of works on show includes iconic pieces of classical modernist art from our close neighbor, the Leopold Museum, and magnificent support with works from the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Austrian Theater Museum, which is loaning Gustav Klimt s famous work Nuda Veritas (1899), and significant additional works from the Vienna Museum, the Kokoschka Archive at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, the Friedrichhof Collection, and further loans from private collections in Austria. The central concepts of Body, Psyche, and Taboo that make up the title of the exhibition indicate that this show is a presentation of both the intellectual and the formal links between Vienna Actionism and artistic developments in the early twentieth century. Works by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the scandal artists of the 1960s, are compared and contrasted with pieces by their equally controversial colleagues working at the dawn of the twentieth century from Gustav Klimt to Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Koloman Moser, to Anton Romako, Max Oppenheimer, and Egon Schiele. Both early modernism and the period around 1960 in Vienna were characterized by a revolutionary sense of a new start in society and in culture and the arts. Conventions of representation and artistic genres were redefined, a faith in the power of art to shape and remold society led to new utopias and radical forms of provocation against the traditional order. It was not by coincidence that the protagonists of Vienna Actionism saw the iconoclasts of the early twentieth century as role models, with their radical references to the body and violations of taboos, and in their interdisciplinary and synergetic forms of art. Like the Viennese modernists, the later Actionists pursued a committed approach that enabled them to gain significance far beyond their local spheres of action. The works of both movements made significant contributions to international art history, and their relevance is increasingly recognized today, as the achievements and intellectual developments of the twentieth century are undergoing review. This mumok exhibition identifies numerous similar motifs and styles, while also concentrating on comparable subject matter. Both at the beginning of the century and in the 1960s, the human body was seen as the mirror and counterpart to existential and social experience. The works of both generations are replete with 7 Press release, January 27, 2016

8 psychological portraits, and depictions of the exposed body with its experience of pain. Self-portrayals as martyrs are frequent, as are notions of the artist as a priest and savior of society. Restrictive borders are opened up, and art adopts an interdisciplinary approach. This also includes photographic (and later film), theater, literary, and musical art forms, often linking these with each other. Psychoanalysis and a critique of language also bring the potential of new scientific discourses into the artistic works. Curated by Eva Badura-Triska 8 Press release, January 27, 2016

9 HAWSER / HOFER March 4 to May 22, 2016 Press conference: March 2, 2016, 10 am Opening: March 3, 2016, 7 pm From March 4, 2016, mumok is presenting two young artists who both reflect critically on contemporary concepts of nostalgia, re-evaluating these with new works made especially for this mumok show. Kathi Hofer (born 1982 in Hallein) draws on her own family history and an Austrian fashion icon the artist comes from the Salzburg Hofer family that, up to the year 2000, produced the Austrian clothing brand Walkjanker. The timeless elegance of these clothes survived trends and technological innovation for fifty years, and they were included in the portfolios of top fashion houses and magazines and worn by international stars including actress Grace Kelly, the writer Ernest Hemingway, and the Paris fashion designer Kenzo. Eloise Hawser (born 1985 in London) also works with objects that may seem to be long obsolete, bringing these under new conditions into the context of contemporary art. Her work for mumok is based on her ongoing research on cinema organs. Drawing on the long tradition of the Hofer company, Kathi Hofer creates an updated formal language comprising reused materials, traditional knowhow, and inherited glamor. A central idea of my project is the idea of recycling: the recycling of materials, processes, of knowhow, memories, of style and status (Kathi Hofer). Hofer s artistic materials are tools, production processes, display elements, sales accessories, and fashion photography from the heyday of the firm between the 1960s and the 1990s, all of which she combines to make her own new installation. Her gesture of appropriation refers to the complex social relations between people and objects. In her first exhibition in Austria, Eloise Hawser looks for the traces of the passing of time, by continuing her research on cinema organs. These were invented in the early twentieth century by the British telephone engineer Robert Hope Jones, and were frequently used in the age of silent movies as an alternative to musical accompaniment of movies by an orchestra. Often, cinema organs were built into the architecture of movie theaters. With the advent of the talkies, they became obsolete, yet were often too big and complex to be easily removed from the theaters. Hawser has already explored this forgotten musical instrument in her 2015 exhibition Lives on Wire at the ICA in London and in her film Solo (The Burberry Wurlitzer). For mumok, she has made two new films based on her research into cinema organs, focusing on two silent cinema organs that today are found in former cinemas turned into fashion stores the Burberry Shop in London (UK) and the former Wanamaker Department Store in Philadelphia (US). Hawser films these cinema organs that lie unused behind the scenes of contemporary temples of consumerism, and to do this she enters directly into the organs pipe chambers. These complex interiors make for a stark contrast to the dressed spaces of the fashion stores, with their plinths displaying carefully styled mannequins. The films seek to communicate ideas about 9 Press release, January 27, 2016

10 the remotely controlled machines that hide behind the attractive facades of contemporary consumerist spaces. The chamber of each organ contains chromatic percussion instruments including xylophones, triangles, cymbals, and tambourines. Hawser brings these to life in her films and they begin to beat like hearts undergoing resuscitation. Hawser explores parallels between human bodies and machine mechanisms, and delves deeply into the bodies of cinema organs through exploring their innermost parts: the pipe chambers. The works of these two artists are presented in a joint setting on mumok s Level 2. Together they amount to a proposal on how artists may address historical and biographical fragments without succumbing to anachronisms. Hofer and Hawser take an accomplished look at the found fragments of the past so as to bestow new meaning on them for the present. Curated by Barbara Rüdiger 10 Press release, January 27, 2016

11 We Pioneers Trailblazers of Postwar Modernism May 12, 2016 t0 March 5, 2017 From May 12, 2016, mumok will be showing the exhibition We Pioneers: Trailblazers of Postwar Modernism about two charismatic personalities in art and culture after 1945: Viktor Matejka and Werner Hofmann. These two men both greatly influenced the postwar Vienna art scene, and this exhibition looks in particular at their intensive activities as collectors and archivers of art. As the founding director of the former Museum of the 20th Century, forerunner of today s mumok, Werner Hofmann ( ) created the basis for today s museum, and his entire founding collection will be on show in this exhibition. In postwar Vienna, Hofmann was the most radical proponent of the idea of modernism. He saw the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s as the essential art of the century. His teaching collection, begun in 1960, includes all the key movements and artists expressionism (Richard Gerstl, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka), cubism and futurism (Giacomo Balla, Henri Laurens), and constructivist trends and the Bauhaus (László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian). Dada and surrealism are represented by Max Ernst and René Magritte. This collection includes a number of iconic works of modernism, like André Derain s Homme accroupi (Crouching Man, 1907) and František Kupka s Nocturne ( ). As well as his collection of classical modernism, Hofmann also purchased contemporary international works. His focus was on painting and sculpture, but he was also interested in film, photography, dance, and music. This new exhibition will present major works from Werner Hofmann s collection and also his activities as a collector and curator by means of documents, photographs, and posters. The collector Viktor Matejka ( ) is also closely linked to the mumok. He was Vienna s first postwar city councilor for culture and a key figure in the city s cultural life, who remained much in demand even after leaving office. After 1945, Matejka s priorities were to critically review the Nazi period and to attract exiled artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Arnold Schönberg back to the city. For Matejka, working with history was an educational task that also required the work of the archives. He was a great promotor of adult education programs in the Vienna Volkshochschulen, and before the war he had already begun to set up his first now unfortunately lost archive, in line with his credo: Nothing is lost if it is collected and secured. During a period of internment in Dachau concentration camp, he created his legendary Pickbücher, homemade books for fellow prisoners put together from newspaper cuttings. After the end of the war, Matejka set up a new large media archive devoted to various themes from politics, culture, and contemporary history. He gave his archives on the fine arts to mumok in the late 1970s, with the requirement that this archive be continually expanded. It focuses on the 1960s and contains newspaper and magazine cuttings and numerous miscellaneous pieces. This exhibition presents a selection together with significant works by the most 11 Press release, January 27, 2016

12 important artistic groups after This begins with the postwar academy teachers, Herbert Boeckl, Albert Paris Gütersloh, and Fritz Wotruba, and shows the abstract artists associated with the Galerie (nächst) St. Stephan, the fantastic realists, Maria Lassnig, the Vienna Group, and the Vienna Actionists from the mumok collection. Curated by Susanne Neuburger, with Marie-Therese Hochwartner 12 Press release, January 27, 2016

13 Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age June 4 to November 6, 2016 Press conference: June 3, 2016, 11 am Opening: June 3, 2016, 7 pm The exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age places our sustained interest in contemporary painting and the continuous expansion of digital technologies within a surprising historical context. This exhibition goes back to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s and shows how painting already then developed in productive friction with mass culture and its media. From the arrival of television to the so-called internet revolution, painting has consistently succeeded in integrating the mechanisms that seemed to herald its own death. With more than two hundred artworks by more than one hundred artists, Painting 2.0 tells the multifaceted story of painting from the 1960s to the present. Painting is seen as a form of practice that contrary to canonical accounts in no way shies away from increasing media realities, but rather faces the challenges head on. One driving force in this development is the collision of visual codes of the spectacle with the traces of painterly expressivity. Painting 2.0 shows that the expressive gesture was again and again connected with the desire to reintegrate the virtual world of the information age into the material realm of the human body. In painting over the last fifty years, the contrary domains of the human and the technological, and the analog and the digital have proven to be intrinsically intertwined. Painting 2.0 proposes three different genealogies that trace these links between painting and the media. Gesture and Spectacle asks how painterly gestures are used as a way of (en)countering a culture of spectacle. This ranges from attitudes of protest to commercial imagery and media, as in Niki de Saint Phalle s shooting pictures or the torn billboard advertisements of the affichistes Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villeglé, and Raymond Hain, to painting strategies that appropriate the logic of the spectacle, such as Keith Haring s Subway Drawings, Albert Oehlen s computer pictures, and Monika Baer s abstract paintings with banknotes and coins. Eccentric Figuration inquires how notions of corporeality change under the influence of commercial mass culture and new technologies. From the prosthetic bodies in the painting of Maria Lassnig, to the anti-heroic gesture of Mary Heilmann s pictures, to Elizabeth Murray s excessive pictorial bodies and the humorous bodily abstractions of Amy Sillman, artists have always engaged the body as a key instrument of knowledge that registers social and technological change in a myriad of ways. Social Networks presents positions in painting that evidence a network society, both through practices of image circulation and by addressing specific social contexts. Andy Warhol s Factory, the paintings and actions of capitalist realists Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner, the artists of the 13 Press release, January 27, 2016

14 feminist New York A.I.R. Gallery, and also contemporary positions in what is referred to as Network Painting Seth Price and R.H. Quaytman all demonstrate how ideas of community and social exchange have transformed since the 1960s. Curated by Manuela Ammer (mumok curator), Achim Hochdörfer (director of the Brandhorst Collection), and David Joselit (distinguished professor, The Graduate Center, City University of New York), with Tonio Kröner (assistant curator, Museum Brandhorst). Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age is a coproduction with the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, where the exhibition is on view from November 14, 2015, to April 30, Press release, January 27, 2016

15 Pakui Hardware Vanilla Eyes June 4 to October 9, 2016 Press conference: June 3, 2016, 11 am Opening: June 3, 2016, 7 pm Since 2014, Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda have been operating together as an artist duo under the label Pakui Hardware. This name derives from Pakui, the extremely quick servant of the Hawaiian fertility goddess Haumea. Legend has it that the children of the goddess were all born from different parts of her body, while Pakui is known for being able to circle the Hawaiian island of Oahu six times in just one day. The fertility symbolism of this myth, based on fragmentation and acceleration, is Pakui Hardware s point of reference for an exploration of a contemporary social dynamic of the body based on technological innovations. Every day on Wall Street endless rows of numbers flicker across the television and computer screens. They transform the flow of capital into purely virtual transactions, while mobile technologies in all fields of our lives are creating new high-tech sensations in record time. This is a reality shaped by virtualization and by dematerialized visions of the future, beneath which the two artists reveal the tangible uncanny and unpredictable effects. Pakui Hardware are particularly interested in the relationship between technology and economy. At the center of their work is the question how this relationship changes our real, physical and bodily worlds and thereby blurs the dividing line between the natural and the artificial worlds. In all our projects, we test the real vs. the fake or the real vs. the more real in a sense that we attempt to create a specific twist where this distinction is troubled. (Pakui Hardware) In their first solo exhibition in a museum in Austria, Pakui Hardware transform the exhibition gallery into an incubator for still unknown (hybrid) beings of the future. This is all inspired by the 1970s science fiction film The Andromeda Strain, and by synthetic biology s potential to create artificial organisms, leading to a scenario of possible new lifeforms and lifestyles. Unhindered by organic limitations and earthly frailty, these new beings are nonetheless subject to a constant and life-sustaining flow of capital. This exhibition contrasts the apparent innocence of synthetic biology, as in the ability to produce artificial aromas, with far more extreme manifestations of artificial life. Still, this modesty is altering reality as it might leave farmers without their main source of income producing vanilla in Mexico or Madagascar. However innocent the current inventions and products of synthetic biology are, the instrument for enhancing and, finally, tailoring human beings has been invented and released into action. From vanilla ice to vanilla eyes? (Pakui Hardware) As in their previous projects, in their mumok show the two artists make use of a mix 15 Press release, January 27, 2016

16 of artistically transformed and natural found objects. In this way, they create a situation that oscillates between the familiar and the strange, manifesting our own ubiquitous euphoria and appertaining fear of technoid lifeforms that are more human than human. Ugnius Gelguda (born 1977, in Vilnius, Lithuania), Neringa Cerniauskaite (born 1984, in Klaipeda, Lithuania). Curated by Rainer Fuchs 16 Press release, January 27, 2016

17 Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2016 October 22, 2016 to January 28, 2017 Press conference: October 21, 2016, 10 am 17 Press release, January 27, 2016

18 Július Koller November 25, 2016 April 18, 2017 Press conference: November 23, 2016, 10 am Opening : November 24, 2016, 7 pm Slovak artist Július Koller ( ) is seen as one of the most important postwar artists from Eastern Europe. From November 25, 2016, mumok is showing the most comprehensive retrospective of Koller s work to date, beginning with works from the early 1960s and presenting his entire oeuvre. In preparing this exhibition, the three curators Daniel Grúň, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Georg Schöllhammer were the first to systematically review the artist s archive, which is closely interwoven with his work. From this research, they have developed a new approach toward display that reflects the full dimensions of Koller s artistic practice. This exhibition thus presents a new appraisal of this iconic figure in postwar European art, whose importance has only been more clearly appreciated and internationally recognized over recent years. Koller s work was made and developed under historical conditions and terms of reference that were diametrically opposed to the frameworks pertaining to Western art, and nonetheless his social approach to art has increasingly influenced a younger generation of artists around the world over the last decade. Koller s dry humor and his conceptual severity are just two facets of a stringent and highly consistent strategy by which the real world and immediate everyday life are utilized for an infinite operation of renaming that creates cultural situations intended to lead to new life a new creativity, and a new cosmopolitan culture. Aiming to put an end to modernist aesthetics, Koller engages in forms of art committed to shaping new cultural and social awareness. In the mid-1960s, Koller published his first manifesto: Antihappening (System of Subjective Objectivity). From 1967 he painted object-pictures in white latex paint that for the first time included the motif of the question mark that was later to become the universal symbol of his interrogation of everyday life. He reacted to empty exhibitionisms in times of political instability by distributing telegrams worded Ume Nie No Art. In 1970, two years after the Prague Spring had been put down by the tanks of the Warsaw Treaty, Koller introduced the acronym U.F.O. into his work: Universal-Cultural Futurological Operations. Over the next three decades he created his major group of works under the same name, while he himself became the subject of series of annual portraits as U.F.O.-naut. 18 Press release, January 27, 2016

19 Tennis and table tennis are a recurring motif in Koller s work as a cultural situation and a form of political statement. He draws tennis courts on postcards, retraces the lines of a tennis court with chalk, or invites to table tennis tournaments instead of exhibitions. For Koller, the principles and procedures of tennis, with its concentrated to and fro of a ball, are akin to democratic fair-play with clearly defined rules. This is a perfect expression of the artist s utopian ideas in a world otherwise shaped by arbitrary political rule-making and rule-breaking. Curated by Daniel Grúň, Kathrin Rhomberg, and Georg Schöllhammer A thematic selection from the retrospective can be seen from September 25, 2015, to January 11, 2016, at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. 19 Press release, January 27, 2016

20 Construction_Reflection Works from the Gertraud and Dieter Bogner Collection at mumok November 25, 2016 to April 18, 2017 Press Conference: November 23, 2016, 10 am Opening: November 24, 2016, 7 pm In 2007, Gertraud and Dieter Bogner gave mumok one of the most uncompromising gifts the museum has ever received. This is the largest single donation of related works, comprising more than a hundred pictures, sculptures, and objects, and three hundred drawings, prints, autographs, artists books, and archive materials. Since 2007, the museum has continued to expand this collection established by the two Vienna collectors. Now, at the invitation of mumok, Gertraud and Dieter Bogner draw on this collection to present a new exhibition entitled Construction_Reflection, taking a specific perspective on these works and their content. The selection includes works from over the last fifty years. The collection began with geometrical and abstract works, and systematic and constructive forms, but soon also began to include conceptual and media-reflective positions. Bucking trends of the time, the Bogners were always interested in the contents of an artwork as a category of constructive and abstract art. In Construction_Reflection they take a contemporary look at this issue by exploring the hitherto covert connections inherent to the works themselves. In this way, the curators see this presentation of this collection as a contribution to present debates about a potential politics of form. Form and contents are not seen as distinct categories, and nor are they understood as divorced from social, cultural, and historical conditions. Although figurative and narrative forms of representation are avoided, this perspective nonetheless allows for socially and political relevant content. Construction_Reflection creates a dynamic and sensual mélange of installations, pictures, videos, photos, texts, and publications on the mumok entrance level, with works by Marc Adrian, Robert Adrian X, Heinz Gappmayr, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, Stansilav Kolíbal, Frantisek Lesák, Richard Paul Lohse, David Maljkovic, Dorit Margreiter, Helmut Mark, François Morellet, Dora Maurer, museum in progress, Hermann Painitz, Peter Sandbichler, Jorrit Tornquist, Peter Weibel, Heimo Zobernig, and many more. Curated by Gertraud and Dieter Bogner with Rainer Fuchs 20 Press release, January 27, 2016

21 mumok cinema in 2016 In September 2011 mumok launched a new series of events the mumok cinema. Since then numerous programs of film, artists conversations, and discussions have addressed the diverse connections between the fine arts and cinema, making mumok cinema a successful interface to a young generation of makers of art. As a venue for exchange and critical enquiry, mumok cinema is seen as an important Vienna meeting place for artists, theoreticians, curators, and a general audience interested in film. In 2016, mumok cinema is continuing its program with various themed film series, controversial single screenings, presentations of new works, and a large number of collaborative projects. Programs include Filipa César & Volker Pantenburg (March 16), students of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, with their program entitled Capitalist Anger (on Screen) that accompanies the mumok exhibition Prosperous Poison. On the Feminist Appropriation of the Austrian Unconscious (April 6), Laura Mulvey, in cooperation with the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (April 20 & 21), Ricarda Denzer, Elske Rosenfel, and others, with their program Speech Acts, curated by Georgia Holz (April 27), Dietmar Brehm & Brigitta Burger-Utzer, in cooperation with sixpackfilm (May 4). 21 Press release, January 27, 2016