The exhibition Prosperous Poison puts forward a reordering of the mumok collection through the concepts and movements that underlie the discussion of art after 1945 – between postwar experience and capitalist realism. The exhibition is structured in five chapters as a narrative that brings to light the cultural, social,...

Opening the two programs compiled by film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey, her films Riddles of the Sphinx (1978) and AMY! (1980), made together with Peter Wollen, will be presented. Riddles of the Sphinx was influenced by the context in which it was made: politically and aesthetically radical filmmaking in the UK in the 1970s....

Chantal Akerman’s first film, Saute ma ville (1968), prefigures some of the themes that would develop in Akerman’s mature work, most particularly: the character’s (played by Akerman herself) obsessive gestures and actions and the enclosed space of the kitchen, in which most of the film takes place. The film’s emotional intensity feeds...

This program is based on Hannah Arendt’s paradigm of “action” as the core human activity. For Arendt, action is defined by language, communication, and the exchange of information. It determines social interaction and guides the ways in which people live together. Therefore it is crucial for the political subject and the political...

Dietmar Brehm has made videos and draws and paints, and since 2007 he has developed 141 scenes within his PRAXIS series, a composite work that Brehm intends to continue. On the one hand, he sees the PRAXIS series as a way to explore his own earlier films and to “develop new dramaturgies of image and sound by means of electronic image...

How do painting and film influence and relate to each other, and what is the relationship between personal experience and social and political developments? In Stefan Hayn’s artistic practice both forms of expression, or rather the mutual interplay of artistic and political action, merge organically in an emotional intensity. While...

Ethnography is describing the Other. In the 1920s, writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston reacted to this established view with her own artistic and scholarly works on everyday cultures in her own home in America’s black south. Hurston political and poetic studies of “folk cultures” that were mostly disparaged at the time are an...