VIENNA.- With a clear programmatic vision and a spirit of openness, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien is entering a new phase under the leadership of Fatima Hellberg, who assumed the role of General Director on 1 October 2025. Hellberg’s aim is to establish the museum more firmly as a space where past, present, and future engage in meaningful dialogue.

“A museum lives through what it absorbs and what it gives back,” says Fatima Hellberg. “It responds to its time, evolves, and forges new connections between art, people, and ideas.”

With Roots to Grow

Hellberg’s programming draws inspiration from the museum’s progressive origins. It reactivates the founding impulse of the Museum of the 20th Century, which was established in 1962 in a spirit of cultural optimism, with the aim of integrating contemporary art into everyday life. In the words of the museum’s founding director, Werner Hofmann: “We need the courage to place the monument alongside the document, the masterpiece alongside the as-yet unconfirmed phenomenon of its time.” Channeling this spirit, Hellberg aims to inaugurate a rejuvenated approach to curatorial thinking at mumok—one that does not only speak about art, but with art.

For Fatima Hellberg, these roots are the foundation for the future: “Our history is not a static legacy but a foundation on which new things can grow. We carry this spirit forward with openness, precision, and curiosity.”

Three Key Elements of mumok’s New Chapter

The new vision of mumok is based on three key elements: the collection, the museum as a space for experience, and the facilitation of new artistic production.

1. The collection as a driving force

The collection serves as a springboard and driving force for the upcoming program. Longer-term, dynamically changing exhibitions aim to bring more works from the storage into the museum, establish new connections, and enable fresh interpretations.

Hellberg says, “The programmatic focus on the collection reactivates it as a source of discourse, research, and encounter, made contemporary through its constant relinking to the present.”

Moving forward, Hellberg aims to foster stronger synergies across exhibitions, weaving together major and minor histories. This shift, Hellberg notes, signals that “the museum’s holdings belong to the public and should be experienced anew through transformed encounters and spaces that invite lingering and revisiting over time.”

2. The museum as a space for experience

To not just look but to experience art: the museum will open as an integrated whole, extending Hellberg’s longstanding commitment to visitor experience and the institution as a site of hospitality. This encompasses renewed attention to the museum’s public spaces: a new concept for the café, improved signage, and a more integrated entrance area.

There will also be a new workshop for all age groups as well as a rest area on level -3, offering generous space for hands-on creativity and reflection. These updates will be complemented by a dynamic program of cross-disciplinary events anchored in thematic strands emerging from the exhibitions themselves.

3. Enabling new masterpieces

In the future, mumok will increasingly support the creation of new works through commissions, collaborations, and long-term artistic partnerships. The aim is to establish the museum not only as a place for exhibiting art but also as a space for creating it.

“We don't just want to preserve art, we want to enable its creation,” Hellberg emphasizes. “I see it as part of our task to give artists space for experimentation, for taking risks, for new forms of expression.”

To implement these core focuses, a key position is filled: Lukas Flygare, previously Head of Collections and Curator at MMK—Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, will join mumok as Chief Curator and Deputy General Director, bringing extensive international experience to the role.

Opening in 2026: A Premiere in Several Acts

On 19 June 2026, mumok will open its new phase with the major exhibition Terminal Piece, which will extend over six floors of the building. Each floor will be staged as an act—a walk-in experience combining elements of theater and museum.

The starting point is the eponymous installation by the pioneering artist, activist, and author Kate Millett from 1972—the first work acquired under Hellberg’s directorship. As an architectural setting that can evoke either a stage or a cage, its meaning unfolds through interaction, shifting with each embodied viewer’s vantage point. The choice of a major feminist work from the US such as Millett’s is hardly incidental, as the rights and advances that preoccupied her some fifty years ago have come to seem increasingly precarious in the present. Along with the installation, Millett's archive on Terminal Piece will be added to the mumok Collection.

The entrance level is transformed into a total environment conceived by pioneering scenographer and costume designer Anna Viebrock. Viebrock radically reconfigures the entrance level by merging backstage and front of house and bringing traces of the museum’s concealed processes into contact with public-facing spaces.

Playing with structures of visibility and viewership, it will host collection works by artists such as Lutz Bacher, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Paul Thek but also more rarely encountered pieces, long held out of view. (1)

Opening concurrently with Terminal Piece is the first solo museum exhibition by Tolia Astakhishvili. Informed in part by her own biography, Astakhishvili’s multimedia approach to space is distinguished by a profound sense of impermanence and the continued presence of the past—of former functions, uses, and users. In a major presentation of newly commissioned and site-specific works, Astakhishvili focuses on “the figure of the child”—a figure whose remarkable autonomy and freedom of mind simultaneously exist in a space of fundamental dependency. Astakhishvili’s presentation will bring her own work into dialogue with the mumok Collection, underscoring its role as a foundation for ongoing conversation.

Careful Considerations

With her vision, Fatima Hellberg is transforming mumok from its very origins. Through a new curatorial strategy, transformed environments, and strategic leadership, mumok is repositioning itself as a space of dialogue, research, and hospitality.

“We don’t want to be a museum of loud effects. Our strength lies in precision, in attentiveness, in the art of close observation and careful listening. Museums change when we fill them with life together with the artists, the teams, and audiences,” concludes Hellberg.

(1) In 2026, mumok and MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna will come together for two major, complementary commissions by the set- and costume designer Anna Viebrock. A total work will be developed at mumok and an artistic staging created in collaboration with the MAK as the central narrative of an exhibition, highlighting and celebrating two facets of Viebrock’s pioneering practice.

The detailed mumok annual program for 2026 will be presented in January.