The mumok museum in Vienna opens a new collection exhibition on November 14, 2026, built around a work that refuses to stay still. Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy takes as its starting point Allan Kaprow's 1963 piece of the same name, a performative installation in which visitors are invited to rearrange furniture and objects into new configurations within the gallery. The show runs until April 4, 2027, with an opening evening on November 13.

Kaprow, often described as the founder of the Happening as an art form, wrote the piece for the painter Hans Hofmann, and it has been restaged many times since. Each staging must be reinvented, and in Vienna the audience's interventions will continually reshape the installation. The act of pushing and pulling furniture also redistributes roles: the curators who furnish the space become artists, while the visitors who alter and compose the materials become its curators.

The exhibition gathers works whose qualities depend on being suspended between categories: artworks or everyday objects, things to look at or things to use, disruption or invitation. Alongside Kaprow, the show includes work by Ant Farm, John Baldessari, George Brecht, Corita Kent, Yoko Ono, Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, Park McArthur, Ree Morton, Milan Knizak, Julius Koller, Christian Philipp Muller, Cora Pongracz and Peter Baum. It is curated by Vanessa Joan Muller and Matthias Michalka, with exhibition design by Robert Muller.

The show is part of a wider exploration of attention at mumok. Where Terminal Piece turns on the act of looking and Verena Paravel's exhibition Exuviae turns on listening, Push and Pull turns on the embodied experience of space: touching and becoming active. At its heart is a generation of artists working in Europe and North America during the 1960s who challenged the museum as a site of collection and preservation, questioned the object-based and commodity-driven idea of art, and invited viewers to complete the work by touching or transforming it. For mumok, that spirit of openness is a reminder that a museum can be a place where objects are not only viewed but activated.