Programme

After three years of renovation, Wien Museum was reopened in December 2023. As a new major player in Vienna’s museum landscape, it impressively demonstrates where the potential and social relevance of museums might lie today. Together with the permanent exhibition team, we will discuss the reference points and principles of the new concept. 

Now that openness and participatory impetus are considered factors of successful museum work, questions concerning the attitude and organisational culture within museums is becoming more and more virulent. Hierarchical systems are increasingly being replaced by team-based and functional models. 

After three years of renovation, Wien Museum was reopened in December 2023. As a new major player in Vienna’s museum landscape, it impressively demonstrates where the potential and social relevance of museums might lie today. Together with the permanent exhibition team, we will discuss the reference points and principles of the new concept. 

Artificial intelligence is currently omnipresent in public debate: Thanks to developments in the field of generative technologies, an ever-larger group of users is able to create new media or transform media content in practically no time at all. This provides new opportunities, but also poses challenges in dealing with text, image, and knowledge cultures. 

Just a passing fashion? Besides high-publicity exhibitions dedicated to paying homage to fashion icons or portraying fashion as the representative mode of rulers or the avant-garde, recent exhibition projects have adopted a wide variety of approaches that go beyond stylisation. Exhibitions are increasingly dealing with socio-political issues through fashion: The topic of dressing is being broached more often in its sociocultural diversity, and fashion (production) is being considered as a magnifying glass on global inequality or, as a subversive gesture, taken as a reference point for discussion in museums.

The international debates on decolonising museum collections find their expression in Austria as well. In a country which has not generally been regarded as a “colonial power”, it is now up to museums to address the topics of “Austrian colonialism without colonies” (Walter Sauer) as well as the role of museums as structural reinforcers of racist power relations and participants in colonial networks.

On our trip, we will examine the conflicting priorities of sites, materiality, and remembrance, with a specific focus on how the different memorials came to be as well as on the material and spatial dimensions of remembrance.

It takes more than simply presenting objects in display cases to make early history approachable. Archaeological museums, in particular, face the challenge of creating contemporary ways of illustrating history that are both valid in terms of content and attractive to their audiences. 

Museums have always negotiated between self-perceptions and perceptions of others. In Scandinavia, museums are committed to them.

Myths are a constant of popular constructions of history. Historical public figures have been inscribed into the collective historical consciousness through their intensive—and selective—reception. The veritable cult surrounding them can present a challenge to exhibition designers.

Processes of opening up on all levels—in terms of staff, programmes, and audiences—are currently a key agenda item of those museums wishing to redefine their mission and relevance in the context of heterogeneous societies. In view of the demographic realities, new structural approaches and strategies to curatorial and educational work are to be discussed as part of Prospects for Openness. 

Rural areas have been ascribed various attributes. From an urban perspective, the “countryside” is the object of projections: from a bucolic place of longing on the one hand to images of backwardness or structural weakness on the other. However, the once clearly perceived line between “urban” and “rural” lifestyles seems to be steadily disappearing in light of an increasingly more mobile and connected world. Traditional attributions—as well as traditionalising self-conceptions in terms of culturally homogeneous communities—no longer represent the realities of rural life.

The question of collecting is increasingly becoming the focus of attention once again—in contemporary art museums too. Their realignment as venues where it is possible to reflect on contemporary and future societal challenges also provides alternative opportunities for the practice of collecting as the central aspect of museum work.

Graphic stories in the form of comics, cartoons, and graphic novels have long since made their way as pieces into museums—as art forms and integral parts of popular culture. What is relatively new, however, is that illustration itself has been found to be an alternative method of organising and displaying the content of exhibitions. The combination of text and image makes it possible to reduce complexity while at the same time retaining it. 

Whether it be the progressive opening of the Humboldt Forum, the educationally interesting Anne Frank Centre, the new permanent collection and award-winning children’s world of the Jewish Museum Berlin, or the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation and its controversial history of development—recently, there have been a number of (re)openings of established and new institutions in Berlin worth visiting. 

New forms of collaboration increasingly go hand in hand with the aspiration of many museums to be a place of discussion on contemporary issues and to involve new groups of stakeholders. On an ever more frequent basis, major museums with hegemonic histories of establishment and existence are daring to address current, politically explosive issues and engage in discussion with activists. And these seem to find museums to be a useful platform for their concerns.

Our understanding of work is shifting: Not only is our work world changing dramatically, but our view of it as well. Museums are also helping to shape notions of work: What is represented in museums as “work”, and what activities are excluded from it, is part of this process of negotiation. The long-standing focus of museums on agricultural, artisanal, and industrial work is increasingly being challenged by current developments.

The museum has maintained an ambivalent relationship with audio and sound sources. On the one hand, traditional museum etiquette calls for visitors to be quiet and mindful of the noise they make, while on the other hand, designed listening experiences are playing an ever-bigger role in exhibitions. The use of sound in museums extends from fully composed sound experiences that create a certain ambience or offer guidance, to making the human voice more audible, to strategies that allow us to perceive, for instance, the specific sound of a city or region. Sound, noise, or silence can also serve as the theme or tool of exhibitions.

The legacy of National Socialism is often not visible in museum collections and goes far beyond what is commonly known as ‘looted art’. During the National Socialist era, many museums, through their acquisition policies and art dealings, expanded their collections, which were aligned with Nazi ideology—including art that explicitly conformed with the system and often remained in repositories after 1945. Also in the following decades, and up to this day, items with a Nazi history have found their way into museum collections through a variety of routes. There they are stored, often largely unnoticed and more or less under lock and key. Is that a good thing?

The pandemic has fundamentally tested the relationship between museums and their audiences. This also applies for the long-standing connection with schools: If up till then museums had been established places of learning outside of schools, they were suddenly no longer available. Conversely, a vacuum opened up in museums, with the otherwise relatively steady stream of school groups staying at home. These exceptional circumstances have given rise to a wealth of new digital opportunities, specifically for schools.