Artists

Groupshow

Press release

Curated by Fatima Hellberg and Lukas Flygare Terminal Piece is an exhibition in five acts, anchored by a single artwork: the installation Terminal Piece (1972) by artist, activist, and author Kate Millett. As the first acquisition made under mumok’s new directorship, it foregrounds the act of viewing itself—asking not only what is seen but from where and on which side of the work one stands. Millett, one of the defining feminist voices of her generation, believed in art’s capacity to produce moments of intense, direct experience. The exhibition asks what this idea still means today. Who is watching? Who is seen? Where do we position ourselves? These questions become a lens through which to consider some 400 artworks, drawn from mumok’s collection and placed in dialogue with loans and new commissions. The exhibition invites visitors to explore embodied attention and discover new ways of seeing: Encountering art is never passive. To look is to participate. Each floor unfolds as a distinct act, tracing the shifting relations between art, life, and perception. It begins with a prologue conceived by Anna Viebrock, transforming the ground floor to propose a new way of encountering the museum collection. In Act 1, Millett’s Terminal Piece stages the tensions of looking. Act 2 turns inward to trace the friction between political ideals and lived experience. Act 3 looks to documentary and witnessing to approach realities that may exceed language. Act 4 explores the apparatus of seeing through the work of Nina Porter and the collection. Together, the acts suggest multiple ways of engaging with the world. The word “terminal” typically signals an end, yet it also marks the beginning of something new: a departure connected to what came before. Taking a single artwork as its starting point, Terminal Piece treats the museum and its collection as constantly reshaped by the people who move through it—open, alive, and changed by every encounter.