second childhood with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Thursday, July 23, 2026
7 to 8.30 pm

 

Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Fatima Hellberg, Director General of mumok and co-curator of Tolia Astakhishvili, Figure of the Child, discuss the process behind the exhibition: the collaborative nature of Astakhishvili’s work, the tension between artistic practice and institutional presentation, and what it means to allow an exhibition to develop and emerge from within the institution itself.

Figure of the Child is Tolia Astakhishvili’s first solo museum exhibition. The notion of the “first encounter,” as children experience it when initially perceiving a phenomenon, serves here as a key to a new kind of experience.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of Serpentine, London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Previously, he served as Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since organizing his first exhibition, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 400 exhibitions worldwide.