Kate Millett, Terminal Piece, 1972, wood, wooden chairs, female mannequin. Installation view, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2021. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
FATIMA HELLBERG is a curator and general director of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (MUMOK). Previously, Hellberg served as director of Bonner Kunstverein (2019–25) and artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2015–19). She has curated exhibitions and projects at institutions including the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Tate Modern and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Malmö Konsthall; and Museion, Bolzano, Italy. Hellberg is currently curating the inaugural exhibition of her new program at MUMOK, “Terminal Piece,” scheduled to open on June 19.
IS THERE A MOVIE, TELEVISION SHOW, OR THEATRICAL PRODUCTION THAT HAS CHANGED THE WAY YOU CURATE?
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s film Leviathan (2012) follows a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic. It stages a contained collapse of the documentary form, veering between sensory overload and the sublime. Small, nimble cameras occupy perspectives inaccessible to human perception, creating images that are more visceral and embodied than the purely retinal. In the absence of verbal narration, we witness an interconnected logic of violence: The camerawork lets us see the brutal working conditions, but also the brutality toward other sentient beings and the sea, all unfolding as part of the same process. There’s something unsettlingly surreal about these images, heightened by the fact that the procedures are so routine. There can be remarkable power in trusting one’s senses and surrendering to a narrative devoid of explanation but driven by an undeniable sense of mission. When watching and revisiting Leviathan, I know I have experienced something. This knowing is also what I want to offer the viewers of the shows I curate—at times quieter in volume, but still carrying the feeling of having been through something and the heightened aliveness that comes with it.
IF YOU COULD DO A STUDIO VISIT WITH AN ARTIST FROM ANY ERA, WHO WOULD YOU PICK?
I would have loved to meet with writer, artist, and activist Kate Millett (1934–2017). She is mostly known as the author of the 1970 book Sexual Politics, but her artistic practice was also deeply fascinating and complex. The 1965 murder of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens and the way the press covered it as merely another isolated event triggered a major shift in her work. In her own words, it was “like the collapse of a building. But the rubble revealed a certain door; perhaps it had always been there.” One of the works to emerge from her process of mourning was the installation Terminal Piece, 1972, which MUMOK recently acquired. When asked about the work, Millett said she had to make it because it could not be written: The experience of the piece hinges on the viewer’s agency in navigating the space, so it offers an object lesson on the things art can do that other forms can’t. Given the political backsliding since then, the chance to pick her brain about the developments of women’s rights and what it means to make committed art would have been a true gift.
WHAT IS A QUESTION THAT YOU ALWAYS ASK IN A STUDIO VISIT?
Probably how someone got started. In the process of making work, not every decision is conscious; at some point this process acquires a life and logic of its own, and that’s something I am drawn to. An exhibition is a temporary proposition that establishes an internal logic between works while channeling the outside world. For me to be able to “get it” as a curator and make space for this process, I need to pay attention to this undercurrent so I can understand the entity the show can become. This isn’t separate from context and politics, but part of them.
WHAT KIND OF ART WOULD YOU MAKE IF YOU MADE ART?
I have made work before, though it is often driven by considering what kind of hinge a show needs to slip into place—which usually tends to be sculptural. We often think that subjectivity and vulnerability are the purview of the artist, while the curator functions at a certain remove, but I don’t think that assumption of neutrality is accurate or effective. Some of the most finely attuned curatorial work is done by artists, and I see making work as a productively difficult space. I’ve also made work in collaboration with artists, most enduringly with the artist Annika Eriksson, who is also my mother.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ARTWORK IN YOUR CITY?
Parmigianino’s circa 1523–24 painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In the foreground, a soft, youthful hand appears larger than the boyish face behind it, which bears an ambivalent expression of self-admiration and searching uncertainty. It seems like the artist is caught between introspection and getting lost in the distortions created by the mode of representation. One of my favorite poets, John Ashbery, first saw the original painting on a trip to Vienna in 1959 and later reconsidered it in his 1974 poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” His response is marked by a companionship born of desire—that simple yet powerful quality of being drawn to an image and returning to it. The poem is also a reminder that collections are full of things waiting to be reanimated. For me, Parmigianino is also Ashbery: bent grammar and distorted lines.
IS THERE A PARTICULAR BOOK THAT IS INSPIRING YOU RIGHT NOW?
I keep looping back to poet and writer Fanny Howe’s Night Philosophy (2020),a book of fragments concerned with the “figure of the child.” Finely attuned, her writing conveys the strange combination of children’s autonomy of mind and their profound dependency. For Howe, the child embodies someone who can’t quite figure out how to manage but is constantly being forced to adapt. Some excel at it, others don’t, but rarely do we pause long enough to ask what gets lost in the process. The book itself spans a variety of texts and voices, all held together by Howe’s remarkable precision and sense of justice.
WHAT IS THE MOST URGENT PROBLEM FACING ARTISTS?
It is becoming increasingly difficult for artists across the board to survive, and that brings a lot of fear: of course, the fear of not being able to make the rent, now compounded with the fear of being too political or not political enough, of saying the wrong thing or simply “being too much.” To navigate these conditions, artists have had to become more calculated and strategic, but that tactical approach also robs them of the freedom needed to make art. Ariana Reines’s book Wave of Blood (Divided Publishing, 2024) is a beautiful and brave attempt at countering this paralysis and finding power in “un-knowing.” Resolve in grappling with ambivalence and doubt can be a wondrous thing.
