Július Koller

• mumok, Vienna (AT)
• 14.11.2026–04.04.2027

The exhibition Push and Pull takes its title from a 1963 work by the American artist Allan Kaprow and invites the public to approach the museum as a place where things can not only be viewed, but also activated and transformed.
By encouraging visitors to touch the works and physically engage with them, Push and Pull extends this year’s program focus on forms of attention. Other facets, such as acts of looking or listening, are at the heart of the exhibition Terminal Piece and, from December onwards, Verena Paravel’s exhibition Exuviae.
For Allan Kaprow, who is considered the founder of happenings as an art form, the event character of everyday life was of central importance. His work Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann is the center of gravity for an exhibition that deliberately brings together works distinguished by the way they hover in a kind of limbo: Artwork or everyday object? To look at or to use? A disruption or an invitation?

The exhibition addresses its audience directly and is continually transformed through their creative interventions. Visitors are invited to rearrange furniture and objects into new configurations within the designated space. Each of their arrangements thus becomes part of an open-ended work that is constantly taking on new forms. Here, “pushing” and “pulling” are not just playful acts but also entail a redistribution of roles. The curators who “furnish” the space become artists, while the visitors who “compose” the installation’s materials become curators.
For mumok, such moments of openness and a spirit of hospitality toward the audience are essential. The decision to once again exhibit Kaprow’s “furniture comedy” in 2026 is part of a broader desire to actively involve audiences in the process of transforming and redesigning a space. At the same time, it comes as an invitation to reflect together on what a museum can and wants to be. [...]

In the former Czechoslovakia, Július Koller [...] created so-called “anti-happenings” from the 1970s onward, which took place in both private and public spaces. Koller understood art not as the production of objects, but as a form of action that engages with everyday life and social responsibility. During a period of political and cultural repression, he developed simple yet symbolically charged gestures and actions that communicated beyond institutional and ideological boundaries. Sports and games, especially table tennis, became metaphors for dialogue and democratic interaction. In response to the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, he founded the J.K. Ping-Pong Club, which challenged sporting and social rules as well as patterns of collective control in favor of new forms of social interaction.

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