A museum without walls: contemporary art appears on bridges, in newspapers, across the Vienna State Opera—and, historically, even on an aircraft tray table.
There is no central exhibition circuit. Instead, museum in progress develops temporary, context-specific projects in collaboration with artists, curators, businesses, newspapers and cultural institutions.
Museum in progress is more influential as an idea than as a traditional tourist attraction. Do not navigate to the Hofmühlgasse office expecting museum galleries. Plan around a specific public project.
About the venue
About
Founded in 1990, museum in progress anticipated many questions that later became central to contemporary curating: how to work beyond the white cube, reach non-specialist audiences and use mass media as an artistic space rather than simply as a promotional tool.
The organisation was influenced by Joseph Beuys’s expanded understanding of art. Its projects erase the usual separation between exhibition space and everyday life, while demonstrating that a museum can be understood as a system of relationships, commissions and ideas—not only as architecture and a collection.
Worth the trip
Go because museum in progress asks a genuinely interesting question: does a museum require a building?
Its exhibitions appear where people already are—in newspapers, magazines, railway stations, public bridges, websites, theatres and commercial media. The audience may encounter the work accidentally, without first deciding to “visit art”.
