imumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig WienNeubau
The Georgian artist's first solo museum show uses the "figure of the child" to rethink first encounters with art, drawing in movement, touch and works by Picasso, Goldin and Paik.
Down in mumok's basement there's a life-sized bathroom with its shower and plumbing exposed, white bedding on the floor scattered with drawings, and air vents humming. Astakhishvili built it, as my emptiness, from excavated pipes, a bathtub, a shower tray and mirrors.
You enter through a red-lit corridor lined with tarpaulin, then follow passages of drywall and plastic that narrow and open into bigger rooms across two underground floors. Small wooden huts hold works by other artists, from Vito Acconci to Dieter Roth, and Picasso, Nan Goldin and Nam June Paik turn up along the way. The one bed says "You can sit and rest", facing six hours of Acconci in a lift with roosters.
Writing for e-flux, Chris McCormack found it "grounded in trying, once more, to make a home". Go before 18 October if you can: Level -2 closes then for the next show's setup, and Level -4 runs to 1 November. It's on the standard €18 ticket.
my emptiness
Look for the life-sized bathroom with exposed shower and plumbing, extractor units stuffed with abandoned keepsakes, and white bedding on the floor covered in drawings.
Their own small gardens
Twenty boxy Hantarex monitors sit on the floor, playing tracking shots of the building's own infrastructure below.
The red-lit tunnel
A subway-like passage lined with tarpaulin under red light, which the e-flux critic read as a makeshift birth canal.
The huts
Small open-fronted wooden units each hold someone else's work, from Vito Acconci's Combination to pieces by Charlotte Posenenske, Dieter Roth and Heimo Zobernig.
Wild Thing
A large freestanding structure, made with James Richards, shows a projected video of a puppy lying on a flatbed scanner.
You want art hung on white walls: the collection works here sit inside huts, corridors and makeshift rooms.
Under-19s get in free.
iLeopold Museum
iNatural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)
iNatural History Museum Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)