Is modernism an epoch? How did artists see this in the 1920s? Reading Time in Space answers these questions by referring to four exhibitions and book projects that constituted the first global presentations of modernism and raised key questions in their own time. These projects rested on new concepts of space and time. They include El Lissitzky’s und Hans Arp’s fictitious exhibition project of 1924 and Friedrich Kiesler’s legendary theater exhibition of the same year. In an installation by Nicole Six/Paul Petritsch, this mumok exhibition explores temporal and spatial coordinates whose parameters are constituted by elements of modernism. Referring to a time of upheaval in the arts, sciences, and society, the concept of modernism is an ongoing point of reference in the art history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as works by Werner Feiersinger, Andreas Fogarasi, and Ulrike Grossarth show.
Objects Recognized in Flashes is the title of a group exhibition focusing on surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies. The exhibition was developed by the curator in consultation with the artists Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan.
With Siegfried Zaworka, mumok has for the first time invited an Austrian artist to fill the wall in the museum’s foyer with a site-specific work. Following photography-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, Zaworka focuses his artistic investigation on the devices used in pain- ting. Under the title Funktionale, he has arranged a group of image elements painted on bare canvas into a temporary mural that artfully toys with the vie- wer’s habits of perception. What looks at first glance like a surreal landscape with a mountain range, fir tree, and vegetal forms, turns out on closer inspec- tion to consist in a systematic analysis of the illusionistic potential of painting.