Exhi­bi­tion at mumok Vien­na

The World of Tomor­row Will Have Been Anoth­er Present

May 23, 2025 to April 6, 2026

The World of Tomor­row Will Have Been Anoth­er Present stakes out moments in the mumok Col­lec­tion of clas­si­cal mod­ernism that res­onate to the present day—beyond mere chronol­o­gy and style his­to­ries, beyond sup­pos­ed­ly lin­ear nar­ra­tives.

Who, if not the artists from a col­lec­tion of the twen­ti­eth and twen­ty-first cen­turies like that of mumok, no mat­ter when they may have been active, would under­stand more about such a form of non­lin­ear think­ing? A think­ing back­ward and for­ward at the same time, a think­ing in inter­wo­ven and intri­cate­ly enmeshed par­ti­cles and strands. One that is aware of itself, of its art his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, and is borne by doubt and crit­i­cism of con­ven­tion­al truth and knowl­edge regimes. Seen his­tor­i­cal­ly and from a con­tem­po­rary per­spec­tive, the exhi­bi­tion presents artis­tic prac­tices as a blue-print for cir­cu­lar tem­po­ral­i­ties: as a bud­ding poten­tial, as an exer­cise in net­worked think­ing, a sequence of events with an open begin­ning and end.

The World of Tomor­row Will Have Been Anoth­er Present fea­tures five large-scale instal­la­tions. Five exhi­bi­tions in one exhi­bi­tion, linked togeth­er by the par­tic­i­pat­ing artists’ shared inter­est in tem­po­ral mat­ters. Niki­ta Kadan, Bar­bara Kapus­ta, Fri­da Oru­pabo, Lisl Ponger, and Ani­ta Witek were invit­ed to select works of clas­si­cal mod­ernism from the mumok Col­lec­tion and enter into a dia­logue with them. Depart­ing from their own art­works, which are also among the museum’s acqui­si­tions, and com­ple­ment­ed by works that the artists have cre­at­ed or re-con­tex­tu­al­ized specif­i­cal­ly for this occa­sion, these con­tem­po­raries not only form part of the his­to­ry of the muse­um: by local­iz­ing them­selves in art his­to­ry, they par­tic­i­pate in a dis­course on con­tem­po­rary art. Cur­rent artis­tic ques­tions find their his­tor­i­cal coun­ter­parts. Ques­tions from a past now, from today’s per­spec­tive, posed to a future not yet per­fect. Might this be the present?