VIENNA.- Due to renovation work, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien will be closed from January 8 until the end of May 2024. For the first half of 2024, during the museum’s closing, mumok will be offering five months of extensive programming. Under the framework mumok visits we’ll provide many exciting alternatives to a museum visit.

The mumok collection today comprises around 10,000 works by c. 1,600 artists. In 1959, the first purchases were made for the newly founded Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, which held 90 works when officially opened in 1962.

A key impulse for the museum's exhibition and collecting policy was provided by the Ludwig and Hahn Collections in the 1970s, which were shown from 1979 in a second building, the Palais Liechtenstein. The Hahn Collection was purchased by the Republic of Austria, whereas the loans by Peter and Irene Ludwig were permanently guaranteed for the museum by establishing the Austrian Ludwig Foundation. The Republic of Austria agreed in turn to provide a budget that has enabled the Foundation to expand its collection of key works of international modernist and contemporary art - to this day.

The mumok collection consists of several "blocks" that correspond to the different stages in the museum’s history. The period to after World War Two is covered by holdings in classical modernism that were purchased by the museum's founding director, Werner Hofmann. A further focus is the Ludwig and Hahn Collections, with their emphasis on the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last 15 years a comprehensive collection of Vienna Actionism has been built up. mumok collects contemporary art with an emphasis on photography, video, and film, as well as painting, sculpture, and installations, works which have mainly been added to the collection over the last two decades.

The following is the exhibition program 2024.

Avant-Garde and Liberation. Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism
June 7, to September 22, 2024

The exhibition will feature more than 25 artists from South Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, highlighting the importance of global modernism for contemporary art. It poses questions about the political circumstances that move contemporary artists to look back at these non-European avant-gardes that were formed from the 1920s to the 1970s as a counterpart to the dominant western variety of modernism. What are the potentials that artists see in tying in with decolonial avant-gardes in Africa, Asia, and the “Black Atlantic” for combatting current forms of racism, fundamentalism, or neocolonialism?

Jongsuk Yoon. Kumgangsan
June 7, 2024 to August, 2025

On the occasion of its reopening, mumok has invited the artist Jongsuk Yoon to conceive a new mural for the museum lobby. After photo-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, the most recent artist to create a mural was Siegfried Zaworka, who in his work dealt with the illusionist potentials of painting. Jongsuk Yoon now responds to the challenge of the monumental format with levitating, wholly anti-monumental and anti-heroic landscape pictures.

Mapping the 60s. Art Histories from the mumok Collections
July 5, 2024, to February 1, 2026

With Mapping the 60s. Art Histories from the mumok Collections, the museum swivels its focus on the 1960s. The developments of that period are both paradigmatic in terms of the social and political climate and formative in terms of cultural policies. The exhibition attempts to create a selective cartography of the 1960s in a deliberately fragmentary display of historical regularities, entanglements, and contexts between individual events, artists, and works.

nowhere / now here: A Performance Festival
July 5 to August 11, 2024

The performance festival nowhere / now here, developed and curated in collaboration with ImPulsTanz, will see appearances by various contemporary choreographers, such as Trajal Harrell and others. A selection of film works by vanguards of performance art will be projected on large surfaces and serve either as fixed stage designs or as a narrative anchor point.

Nikima Jagudajev. Basically
August 29 to October 27, 2024

The performance festival culminates in Nikima Jagudajev’s performative exhibition Basically. Basically is an ongoing live project whose exhibition format is a hybrid production space, residency space, schoolyard; a context to practice and perform within. Jagudajev's process based collaborative practice looks at social forms; social relations as spatial relations and how we assemble in fulfilling and considerate ways. They call this practice re-schooling, coming together and sharing devotions.

Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture
October 19, 2024, to February 23, 2025

In the fall, we are happy to present Medardo Rosso. Inventing Modern Sculpture. Rosso is one of the major pioneers of modernism. With about fifty sculptures and a wide selection of photographs, photocollages, and drawings, mumok will dedicate a comprehensive retrospective to this artist and artisan, art theorist and proto-installation artist, master of public-oriented staging and friend and later rival of Auguste Rodin. The show thus also ties in with the museum’s earliest collection holdings.

Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive
November 15, 2024 to May 4, 2025

2024 will close with the exhibition Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive. Born in New York in 1939, Lijn has been working at the interface of art, poetry, and science for more than six decades. The survey exhibition, organized in cooperation with Haus der Kunst in Munich, marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the German-speaking
world.