How Mumok’s New Director Plans to Make Museums Feel Alive Again

Museums & Institutions How Mumok’s New Director Plans to Make Museums Feel Alive Again Fatima Hellberg, the newly appointed director general of the Vienna museum, on why doubt is a necessary part of the job. Fatima Hellberg, the newly appointed director general of the Vienna museum, on why doubt is a necessary part of the job. Kristian Vistrup Madsen ShareShare This Article Asked to sum up the contemporary art scene at the moment, many would speak of conservatism and stylistic recycling; of a market awash in painting, a reversion to gold standard in times of crisis. But there is something else going on too. As director at the Bonner Kunstverein, and newly director at mumok in Vienna, Fatima Hellberg curates with great passion, personality, and sensitivity. Her work conveys a new sense of continuity with history; that art can rely on the intelligence of our senses rather than be made an instrument of discourse; that it does not have to manifest alienation, but can perhaps bring us closer to a sense of presence in our time. In the following conversation she shares her immediate exhibition plans for the Vienna museum, which launch this June, and speaks more broadly about her curatorial vision. Her program begins with Kate Millett’s Terminal Piece, a newly acquired 1972 installation that anchors the collection display; an installation by scenographer and costume designer Anna Viebrock; and an exhibition, open studio, and event space by Tolia Astakhishvili. In the announcement for the presentation of your program, there is a quote by mumok’s founder Werner Hofmann where he says: “We need the courage to place the monument alongside the document, the masterpiece alongside the as-yet unconfirmed phenomenon of its time.” That feels like an interesting place to begin a conversation about what a museum is today. On the one hand, one of our central tasks as a museum is preservation: caring for and attending to the past and keeping moments alive beyond their original lifespan. On the other hand, our mission is also to activate artworks—to bring presentness back into them, and to create a connection with the outside world. Too much aliveness can undo preservation, but too much protection cuts off the possibility of connection. I have been thinking about this as a productive tension between the need to communicate and the need to hide or protect. I think this negotiation produces a generative ambivalence that’s important to mumok as a museum for modern and contemporary art. There is a discourse around the end of the museum, or at least around the exhaustion of the conventions of the modern and contemporary art museums. Kiasma in Helsinki, with its white flowing spaces designed by Stephen Holl, is often described as one of the first contemporary art museums to really establish itself as such in the early 1990s. There was a sense at that time that enough had changed historically that the architecture of the modern art museum no longer sufficed. But in some ways that idea feels anachronistic now. The new National Museum in Oslo is the opposite: a return to a 19th-century model, with heavy doors and enfilades, almost like a bank vault. Where do you think the museum should be going? I think a lot about whether museum spaces are able to hold complexity. And by that I mean whether they can sustain a curiosity about life that includes contradiction, and process —rather than being based on a single or static understanding of what an exhibition needs to be and communicate. Something that’s very important to me is not seeing subjectivity as something that necessarily excludes other subjectivities. I think there can be a great generosity in sensing the presence of an “I”—of someone who has been close to what they love, telling something about the fantasy and obsessions of the person commissioning or programming. Things that connect, not merely to rational, objective criteria, but another sense of urgency or inner necessity. Such a position also represents a risk. I sometimes think about the word “religion” in its etymological sense—re-ligare, to return to a bind or to reconnect. Not in a theological sense, but as a way of describing that feeling of heightened presence. Bringing this notion into curatorial practice would mean putting less emphasis on newness for its own sake, and instead understanding the perseverance of certain narratives as a resource, a sign of their power and complexity. I think such reconnecting also enables us to reflect on the present in ways that might get us closer to it. There is something very powerful about being able to reconsider the past with reciprocity and recognition, both as a way of facing the presence of an object in our own time, and as an encounter with a history and a mode of witnessing that comes from somewhere deeper. Picking up on the etymology of religion, I’m interested in its relation binding or bondage—that religion is a structure that holds and has boundaries within which not everything is possible, and that this constriction is spiritually and sensually productive. I find it interesting to think about contemporary art moving away from this space of endless, unchecked possibility—the architectural manifestations of which would be these amorphous spaces of Holl in the 90s, or Tate Modern’s turbine hall in the aughts—toward something that is, in a way, contained. Not by dogma or convention, but by material circumstances as well as a certain ethos of integrity and sensitivity. One of the ways I think about contemporary art is as a type of making in which we are not agents who are fully in control of everything, but where there is also space for something to be channeled, or to announce itself to us. You have to put in enough intentionality and enough parameters, or boundaries, that an internal logic can begin to offer answers about what something is. There’s this beautiful quote by Camilla Wills, an artist and publisher who we are collaborating with for the publication of Terminal Piece. She said that there’s a profound shift that happens when you “start taking the unconscious seriously.” Parameters and boundaries are created so that something can come in and break them, or fill the voids you leave in the structure. It is important to trust that that will happen. When there is structure, when there are boundaries, you can leave space for the unknown—or, as Wills put it, for the unconscious. I like what you said about allowing the object to let itself be known, and about having to surrender to it; to apply a certain measure of passivity and patience in waiting for that to happen. That approach feels completely intrinsic to artistic practice. I think many artists just know that this is how one makes art. But it’s not something you hear many curators talk about, probably because the challenge for museums like mumok is precisely to control their narrative and their reception. I think there’s a concern that once you start treating works as many-sided objects that can be turned, they’ll become rudderless or uprooted. But I think it is important to trust that there is a character there, too; a core to the work that is stable and continuous. Also, doubt itself isn’t a disturbance—it’s a necessary part of the work we do. And enduring that doubt doesn’t mean constantly uprooting things. You touched on it in your talk [at Tolia Astakhishvili’s exhibition at the Nicoletta Fiorucci foundation] in Venice—the idea that the more time we spend with objects, the more they acquire something of our attention, and the more alive they become. And by devoting our attention, we become, in turn, more object-like. For that to happen, we must accept that even if the object, in its materiality, in its physical presence in the world, hasn’t changed, there is change. So, by saying that we want a living museum, we also must accept that we won’t be able to control every aspect of that. Change can imply entropy and some unwelcome emotions like fear or melancholy, too. I think one of the things that has made me most sad about the general discourse around art has been a kind of profound suspicion of the natural ambivalence of art objects. People seem genuinely worried of what they might do, wanting to ensure that they only affect us affirmatively. But the relationship we have with objects is dynamic. I don’t understand why we should be so fearful of how objects behave, as if we weren’t actively involved in that relationship—as if we weren’t sharing agency with them. I think that reflects a certain distrust in a quality that is very specific to art. One of my favorite exhibition titles is “On the Condition of Being Art,” because it points to a quality in art that isn’t transferable. That was also one of the things that drew me to Kate Millett’s installation Terminal Piece (1972), which we have newly acquired for the collection, and will serve as a curatorial tuning fork in the opening show which I am curating with my colleague Lukas Flygare. Reflecting on this work, Millett said that she had to make it, since it could not be written. There was also something in the title, Terminal Piece, that felt very potent. A terminal is a starting point—you wait there before a journey begins. But a terminal illness also contains an inevitability of endings. So, the beginning and the end are entangled. We didn’t want to engage with the collection in a way that would force artworks to tell a story that was external to themselves. Instead, we started thinking about method, and how the close attention and engagement between a work of art and viewer can allow a deeper understanding of the condition of being art, or to return to Millett, that which could not be written. In Terminal Piece, you enter a space that can feel either like a stage or like a cage. You’re both looking and being looked at and that transference between the work and the viewer becomes pivotal to what the piece does. I like the idea that, instead of trying to frame works of art in terms of what they are about, you’re positioning a single artwork or artist, like Millett’s Terminal Piece, in order to establish a way of seeing that can structure visitors’ encounters with the display as a whole. The artist I most associate with that idea is Tolia Astakhishvili, because once you’ve internalized her way of seeing, you start to see the whole world in that way. The boundary between what is her work and what isn’t begins to dissolve. You’ve worked with Tolia several times before, and hers will also be the first exhibition in your program, set to open in June. How do you see that exhibition sitting alongside the collection display? Once Terminal Piece had been established as one image world, one logic, it felt important to introduce another energy and another kind of investigation that had a kinship with it, but also very much its own cosmos. We often work in art spaces where the wear of the building, or traces of previous exhibitions, are treated as imperfections that should be corrected. Substantial resources are spent on maintaining this sense of amnesia. Tolia’s work is the complete opposite of that, and I wanted to establish that ethos early on. In one sense, her work continues a legacy of institutional-critical practices—everything matters, the backdrop is material. But at the same time, there’s something very warm, generous, hopeful, and inclusive in what she does. It’s not critique from a position of detachment. It’s deeply engaged, and it implicates herself and others. The last 10 to 20 years were largely about rehashing postmodernism, identity politics from the 1990s, poststructuralism and ham-fisted applications of academic buzzwords. Something about our conversation makes me feel that we might be entering another kind of moment all together. I recently came across a text by curator and writer Anthony Huberman where he writes about putting words like soul and truth back into circulation. You have a similar and rare openness towards this kind of language. I don’t think I could have used those words even five years ago. It’s something that’s emerged in my work over time. Certain conversation partners have been important in shifting my perspective—or maybe it’s a combination of the time changing and me changing. Either way, it is something I notice in artists, friends, curators around me, too – it is a longing for things to matter But it is also something very close, even intrinsic, to the practice of exhibition-making, when you really pay attention to it. There’s an energetic field that you can sense. You make a slight adjustment, and suddenly something happens. It locks into place, and relationships are transformed. The attention to these shifts would be small, hermetic, on their own, but they speak to a larger logic. Rooted, specific and then traveling are words that recur for me. They hint at the possibility for precision and commitment, combined with an openness towards the unknown.