Terminal Piece: mumok turns five floors into a play
"I had to make this work because it could not be written." Kate Millett — writer, sculptor, activist — said that about Terminal Piece, the installation she made in 1972 after visiting a psychiatric ward. mumok has borrowed her sentence as the title and the argument of an exhibition that runs across all five levels of the museum until 7 February 2027.
The show is built like a play, in acts. Each act is organised around a particular mode of seeing, and each puts works from the mumok collection next to newly commissioned pieces. The prologue, on the ground floor, is not a display but a set: the German scenographer and costume designer Anna Viebrock has built a stage there for the art and for the people looking at it. Her working notebook for the exhibition is itself on view, as is a model she made for a 2003 staging of Doktor Faust.
The list of artists is long and deliberately uneven — Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lutz Bacher, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Sophie Calle, Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Rebecca Horn, Birgit Jürgenssen, Zoe Leonard, Louise Lawler, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly, Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, and dozens more. Annie Ernaux appears not as a novelist but as a photographer, with images made with Marc Marie. Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor contribute Leviathan, their 2012 film shot on a North Atlantic trawler.
Curated by Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare, the exhibition comes with a long events programme and a publication co-edited with Camilla Wills of Divided Publishing, pairing a Millett text with new writing by Ariana Reines and others.
Terminal Piece runs from 20 June 2026 to 7 February 2027 at mumok, MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna.
Fotos: mumok, Vienna