Projects
"the set, the double, the stand-in, the prop", Jann Haworth in Conversation with Jo Applin – mumok, Vienna
September 4, 2025
Artist Jann Haworth will be in conversation with art historian Jo Applin, discussing her artistic practice with a focus on her soft sculptures, including Snake Lady (1969–71). Closely associated with British Pop Art and the countercultural spirit of 1960’s Swinging London, Haworth’s work draws on Hollywood film production practices and domestic textile techniques. Her textile sculpture Old Lady (1962) is one of a handful of female representations that appear on the cover of the famous Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which Haworth designed together with British artist Peter Blake. From the 1960s to the present day, Haworth’s practice has been based on a de-hierarchical understanding of artistic agency, which is not only expressed through her interest in popular culture and everyday situations, „low art“ materials including fabric, cardboard, or vinyl, and craft techniques such as sewing and patchwork but also in collaborative projects realized with different members of the community.
Jann Haworth’s Snake Lady was acquired by the Austrian Ludwig Foundation in 2021 and is on permanent loan to mumok. The work is on view at mumok’s collection exhibition “Mapping the Sixties” until September 7, 2025.
The talk will be in English.
Jo Applin is Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art at The Courtauld, London.
She is an editor of Oxford Art Journal and the author of numerous articles as well as several publications, including Lee Lozano: Not Working (Yale University Press, 2018), Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (Yale University Press, 2012), and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field (Afterall and MIT Press, 2012). She is currently writing about art and ageing since the 1960s, in which she discusses Haworth’s soft sculptures.
Jann Haworth has worked as an artist and educator since the 1960s both in the UK and US. Since 1997 Haworth and Liberty Blake have collaborated on a number of educational projects. These include creating arts facilities, an arts-based Charter School, Recycling Hot Glass Studio in Sundance, Utah, Arts Lab for The Leonardo, Utah, and most recently the Work in Progress mural project (2016–present). The project consists of images created with the public in guided workshops, which are then collaged on to panels by Liberty Blake. The mural now consists of 24 panels and is 30m in length. Haworth’s works are represented in international collections—such as mumok, Vienna; Ludwigforum Aachen, Germany; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Tate, UK; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions since the 1960s, including Gazelli Art House, London and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris and MAMAC, Nice, France; MORE Museum, Gorssel, The Netherlands; mumok and Kunsthalle, Vienna.
With many thanks to mumok
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Research Season “Beside, not infinite”
2025/26
“Beside, not infinite” is a collection-related research season, conceived by the Austrian Ludwig Foundation for 2025/26. Within the framework of a series of events, a travel and research grant, and a concluding publication, “Beside, not infinite” takes seven works from the collection as its starting point. Over the past ten years, the Foundation purchased these works at the suggestion of four Austrian national museums—the Albertina, Belvedere, MAK, and mumok—and made them available as permanent loans to these museums’ public collections.
The works by Yto Barrada, Rosemarie Castoro, Sonia Gomes, Jann Haworth, Lee Lozano, Julie Mehretu, and Ingrid Wiener which have been chosen for this project can be seen as material and discursive nodes, situating the collective and academic conversations that “Beside, not infinite” wishes to initiate within the context of the collection. This selection of works also aims to provide an opportunity to examine the collection in relation to the contemporary debates in which artistic practices and academic discourses are involved.
The Austrian Ludwig Foundation has invited the following advisory group of international academics, researchers, and writers to be involved in the project:
Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg, Professor in the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London // Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Professor of Art History, University of São Paulo // Christian Liclair, former Editor-in-Chief, Texte zur Kunst, Berlin // Tina Post, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago // Barbara Reisinger, Research Fellow, Department of Art History, University of Stuttgart // Mike Sperlinger, Professor of Writing & Theory, Oslo Academy of Fine Art // Alena Williams, Professor for Theory and Mediation of Contemporary Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Concept: Bettina Brunner, Managing Director, Art and Academic Activities, Austrian Ludwig Foundation
40th Anniversary Symposium: “Aesthetics, Ethics, Identity—Museum of the 21st Century”, mumok, Vienna
November 19 and 20, 2021
In view of the forty-year history of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation and its task of promoting and acquiring works of art for Austria’s state galleries, the symposium was dedicated to examining current and future perspectives on museum collections. Considering the growing awareness—on an aesthetic as well as an institutional level—of the need to pursue a more inclusive approach to collection practices, i.e., one that takes into account socio-cultural diversity, the lectures and discussions addressed important and oft-debated keywords such as transculturalism, diversity, and cultural heritage, as well as their complicated relationships to processes of globalization. The foundation is delighted that artists Tania Bruguera and Florian Pumhösl as well as museum directors and curators Brigitte Franzen, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Max Hollein, Christian Kravagna, Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Matthias Michalka, Susanne Titz, and Luisa Ziaja participated in the event, all of whom have been fundamental in advancing a historically critical re-conceptualization of collection agendas over recent years.
Day 1
Day 2 Part 1
Day 2 Part 2
Publications
Austrian Ludwig Foundation (ed.), Aesthetics, Ethics, Identity—Museum of the 21st Century, 40th Anniversary Symposium, symposium reader, 2022
This publication summarizes the results of the fortieth-anniversary symposium of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, which was dedicated to examining current and future perspectives on museum collections. With contributions by artists Tania Bruguera and Florian Pumhösl as well as museum directors and curators Brigitte Franzen, Max Hollein, Christian Kravagna, Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, and Susanne Titz.
Österreichische Ludwig-Stiftung für Kunst und Wissenschaft (ed.), Aesthetics, Ethics, Identity—Museum of the 21st Century, 40th Anniversary Symposium, symposium reader, Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor, 2022, 143 pages (available in English only)
ISBN 978-3-903172-96-8
Pia M. Theis, Die Sammlung der Österreichischen Ludwig-Stiftung 1981–2011, 2011
In 1977, the Vienna Künstlerhaus exhibited contemporary art from the collection of Peter and Irene Ludwig, mainly works of Pop art, and photorealism and hyperrealism from the 1960s and 1970s. The Austrian Ludwig Foundation was subsequently established in 1981 with the aim of “contributing to a new conception of the presentation of modern art in the Austrian federal collections,” making an initial contribution of almost 130 works of art from the Ludwig Collection. Through annual acquisitions and the donation of a further 100 works of art from the Ludwig Collection, the holdings of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation had increased almost sevenfold by 2011. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation in 2011, this publication marked the first time that the collection of international works of art, primarily from 1945 to the present, was presented in its entirety.
Pia M. Theis, Die Sammlung der Österreichischen Ludwig-Stiftung 1981–2011, Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2011, 430 pages (available in German only)
ISBN 978-3-86568-689-3