Published in conjunction with the exhibition Park McArthur. Contact M, the eponymous artist’s book will be presented on June 13 at 4 pm. The launch will be followed by a workshop in cooperation with the Department of Art History of the University of Vienna. The workshop will explore the specifics of Park McArthur’s artistic practice against the background of various interests and questions in the form of short lectures, statements and panel discussions. Afterward, at 7 pm, we will be presenting a sound performance by domingo castillo flores.

Workshop and Book Launch

The workshop will feature contributions by Sabeth Buchmann, Sebastian Egenhofer, Anita Hosseini, Stefanie Kitzberger, Barbara Reisinger, Friederike Sigler, and Jenni Tischer, and will make visible the specifics of Park McArthur’s work in the area of current art that is critical of institutions. What characterizes McArthur’s work—methodologically, aesthetically, politically—from the participants’ perspective? What can we learn from her practice? Toggling between input and open discussions, the workshop will reference the current exhibition throughout.

The artist’s book Park McArthur. Contact M contains works and essays by Park McArthur and Geelia Ronkina, numerous color illustrations, and a comprehensive appendix with a list of works and further reading. The bilingual book (English and German) has 216 pages and is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

In addition to the spaces at mumok and Museum Abteiberg, the audio guide, and the exhibition’s online presence, the publication of Contact M constitutes a fifth space that expands the exhibition’s reach. It contains additional works that cannot be viewed in Vienna or Mönchengladbach and provides a comprehensive overview of Park McArthur’s work since the early 2010s. This space of the publication also includes Park McArthur’s photographic works as well as photographic reproductions she commissioned of the installations at mumok and Museum Abteiberg, illustrating the unique spatialities and presentational forms inherent to each location.

Start: 4 pm
For participation in the workshop and book launch, a valid admission ticket or an annual pass is required.
No registration is necessary. Seats will be allocated on site according to capacity.
 

Sound Performance
domingo castillo flores: Contact M (Version)

“The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being. The active violence in reality distracts us from knowing it. Our obligation to ‘grasp’ violence, and often fight it, estranges us from such live intensity, as it also freezes the shiver and disrupts prescience. But this force never runs dry because it is its own turbulence.” (Édouard Glissant, 159)

The ongoing dialogue between castillo flores and McArthur began years ago with a shared, yet unfinished, reading of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Today, their collaboration persists across time zones and life circumstances—a friendship rarely anchored in one place. This spring, they worked collectively to remotely install Contact M’s artworks in Mönchengladbach and Vienna.

Drawing from McArthur’s sonic practice, castillo flores will present:
Contact M (Version)

Music’s materiality—as a gathering space, a convergence of frequencies, and a dispersed mode of shared experience—shapes the exhibition form explored in Contact M. Here, McArthur’s exhibition briefly intertwines with castillo flores’s practice, venturing into sonics together.

Start: 7 pm
As the performance takes place outside regular opening hours, a free online registration is required. The booking module can be found at the bottom of this page.

domingo castillo flores is a musician and retired artist who collaborates often. In 2010, the end / SPRING BREAK, a nomadic pedagogical artist-run project in Miami, Florida, was co-founded with Patricia Margarita Hernandez and produced in collaboration with Kathryn Marks and Cristina Farah. In 2013, the Noguchi Breton gallery (F.K.A. Guccivuitton and Versace Versace Versace) was co-founded with Loriel Beltran and Aramis Gutierrez. In 2016, Public Displays of Professionalism (PDP), a transdisciplinary think tank, was co-founded with Patricia Margarita Hernandez and Natalia Zuluaga.

Park McArthur, born 1984 in Raleigh, North Carolina, studied studio art and Chinese language at Davidson College, North Carolina, sculpture in the MFA program at The University of Miami, Florida, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Previously McArthur taught at The New School for Social Research, New York; Abrons Art Center, New York; Rutgers University, New Jersey; and Leuphana University in Lüneberg, Germany. Past solo exhibitions include Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany and Paid, Seattle, Washington, both 2023; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 2020; Maxwell Graham, New York, 2013 2014, 2020; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, 2017; Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, 2016; Lars Friedrich, Berlin, Germany, 2014; Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, 2014 (with Alex Fleming); and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium, 2013. McArthur participated in the 2021 Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia; the 57th Edition of the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2018; the 78th Whitney Biennial, New York, 2017; the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, 2016; and Greater New York, 4th edition, MoMA PS 1, Queens, New York, 2015.

Image
Park McArthur
Contact M at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna
Installationsansicht von Is this an investment, pied-à-terre, or primary residence?, 2018, Polyurethane Foam, 2025, Contact M, 2025 
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Simon Vogel
[ID: A sculpture of oversized black letters painted onto white museum walls. From this view, the letters spell “Proiects,” with the “j” of “Projects” appearing as an “i:” some letters are cut off by the gallery’s doorways and corners. On the image’s right sits a small sculpture on a white plinth. In the image’s center, another rectangular sculpture, much larger and made of pastel blue polyurethane foam, partially obscures the gallery’s glass entrance and view into the museum’s lobby.]