VIENNA.- Terminal Piece is an exhibition in five acts, anchored by a single artwork: the installation Terminal Piece (1972) by artist, activist, and author Kate Millett. As the first addition to the collection made under mumok’s new directorship, it foregrounds the act of viewing itself—asking not only what is seen, but from where, and on which side of the work one stands. Millett, one of the defining feminist voices of her generation, believed in art’s capacity to produce moments of intense, direct experience. The exhibition asks what this idea still means today.
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Who is watching? Who is seen? Where do we position ourselves? These reflections become a lens for considering some 400 artworks, rooted in mumok’s collection, in dialogue with loans and new commissions. The exhibition is an invitation to explore embodied attention and discover new ways of seeing: Encountering art is never passive. To look is to participate.
Each floor develops as a distinct act, tracing the shifting relations between art, life, and perception. It begins with a prologue conceived by Anna Viebrock, transforming the ground floor to propose a new way of encountering the museum collection. In Act 1, Millett’s Terminal Piece stages the tensions of looking. Act 2 turns inward to trace the friction between political ideals and lived experience. Act 3 looks to documentary and witnessing to approach realities that might exceed language. Act 4 explores the apparatus of seeing through the work of Nina Porter and the collection. Together, the acts suggest multiple ways of engaging with the world.
The word “terminal” typically signals an end, yet it also marks the beginning of something new: a departure connected with what came before. Taking a single artwork as its filter, Terminal Piece treats the museum and its collection as constantly reshaped through the people who move through it—open, alive, and changed by every encounter.
Curated by Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare.
Terminal Piece will be accompanied by an extensive event program and a publication co-edited by Camilla Wills, Divided Publishing, London, which will include a reprint of an original text by Kate Millett as well as new essays by Gregg Bordowitz, Rachel Cusk, Amanda Holmes, and Ariana Reines.
Artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Kobby Adi, Art & Language, Lutz Bacher, Heimrad Bäcker, Peter Baum, Herbert Baumann, Joseph Beuys, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Boyle Family, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Buthe, Alexander Calder, Sophie Calle, Nina Canell, Prunella Clough, Bruce Conner, Melanie Counsell, Moyra Davey, Carla Degenhardt, Sara Deraedt, Erik Dietman, Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie, Jean Fautrier, Robert Filliou, Lucio Fontana, Adolf Frohner, Bruno Gironcoli, Christine Gironcoli, Hermann Glöckner, Louis Goodman, Robert Graham, Hans Haacke, Raymond Hains, Richard Hamilton, Hans Hollein, Rebecca Horn, Joe Jones, Birgit Jürgenssen, Allan Kaprow, Wilfried Klanjsek-Bratke, Jürgen Klauke, Marc Kokopeli, Kurt Kren, Oliver Laric, Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Bettye Lane, Sol LeWitt, Friederike Mayröcker, Kate Millett, Yukio Nakagawa, Bruce Nauman, Chie Nishio, Anna Oppermann, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Megan Plunkett, Sigmar Polke, Cora Pongracz, Nina Porter, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Rudolf Richly, Dieter Roth, Susan Rothenberg, Paul Rotterdam, Thomas Ruff, Gerhard Rühm, Constanze Ruhm, Peter Sandbichler, Kurt Schlögl, Leander Schönweger, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Daniel Spoerri, Haim Steinbach, Takako Saito, Elisabeth Subrin, Paul Thek, Miroslav Tichý, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Rosemarie Trockel, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Anna Viebrock, Wolf Vostell, Yoshi Wada, Franz West, Stefan Wewerka, Karl Anton Wolf, Heimo Zobernig.
