Austria has appointed Fatima Hellberg, a curator and the director of Bonn’s Kunstverein, as the new general director of Vienna’s museum of Modern art, Mumok. She will succeed Karola Kraus, a German curator who has run the museum for 15 years.
Hellberg, who is Swedish, has curated exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Malmö Konsthall and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art in London.
She was chosen from 24 candidates by a selection committee and “presented an outstanding concept with very clever approaches and a lot of esprit,” Andrea Mayer, the Austrian state secretary for arts and culture, said in a press statement.
Mumok’s collection comprises Pop Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art and Vienna Actionism as well as major works of classical Modernism and contemporary art.
“I look forward to extending the rigorous and bold tradition of the institution, whilst considering novel ways of activating and bringing liveness to its collection and expanding its public,” Hellberg said. She added that she is committed to “developing spaces of reflection, experience and confrontation.”