General Director Fatima Hellberg inaugurates new mumok era with innovative Tolia Astakhishvili project
Tolia Astakhishvili, Tolia Curriculum, 2026. Courtesy of the artist. Design: Syndicat.
VIENNA.—
From May 22 to June 18, 2026, mumok launches an ambitious project to inaugurate the program under General Director Fatima Hellberg. In the lead-up to her first solo museum presentation, Tolia Astakhishvili presents Tolia Curriculum, a format that re-envisions the temporality of exhibition-making. For several months, the artist has been developing her exhibition in situ. Tolia Curriculum invites visitors to engage with the production and installation phases typically held out of view. In doing so, she intervenes in conventional museum logistics and shifts the focus to moments of transformation, without clear beginning or end. Visitors can thus encounter the work while it is still taking shape, marking a first in mumok’s history.
“I like bringing people together and creating conditions for things to happen. Everything is a collaboration with, or a memory of, someone or something else,” Astakhishvili notes.
Amidst an evolving architectural environment, Tolia Curriculum unfolds as a daily program of workshops, screenings, readings, and participatory formats for children and adults. These activities are driven by the artist’s ethos of inhabiting space and allowing the traces within to transform it over time. To this end, Astakhishvili brings her close collaborators into the process, opening her practice of exchange and distributed authorship to the public. Contributors include artists James Richards and Veronica Brovall, researchers and writers Livia Polanyi and Kristian Vistrup Madsen, poet Liesl Ujvary, and mumok architect Laurids Ortner. What connects them is a shared understanding of collective practice as a form of education.
“We want to create a situation in which you spend time, become attentive, and experience how something changes,” says Fatima Hellberg. “By opening the museum during a period which is usually invisible to visitors, we get to know the artist, her process, as well as the institution itself, and experience it in a new way.”
Tolia Curriculum transforms the museum into a place where artistic work is experienced as an ongoing process—situated at the threshold between the temporary world of the exhibition and the rhythms of everyday life. The project sets the tone for Astakhishvili’s forthcoming exhibition, Figure of the Child, spanning two floors of the museum, as well as for mumok’s 2026 program. Throughout the year, mumok will focus on the relationships between artworks and viewers, between production and presentation, with the aim of opening up the boundaries between art and life.
“It’s crucial to look at what happens when a museum doesn’t just begin with the finished exhibition,” Hellberg continues. “mumok has a long history of exploring the dynamic interplay between art and life. An important step is sharing this process at a moment when our work is coming into being.”
Tolia Astakhishvili (born 1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi and Berlin. In her interdisciplinary practice, Astakhishvili develops immersive installations that encompass elements of sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. Her work approaches architecture as an open material shaped by the bodies, memories, and stories that inhabit it.
Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice (2025); SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2023). Recent group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, New York (2025); Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2025); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Roma, Rome (2024).
