PRESENTATION:Park McArthur-Contact M

Park McArthur’s work has been described as questioning of “care alongside questions of autonomy and dependency” in regards to the daily experience of disabled individuals. McArthur uses her work to challenge the status quo and give those who are usually marginalized by societal structures a voice. Her choice of medium are sculptures and installations that “conceptually driven and often composed of utilitarian materials such as blocks of foam or a Wikipedia entry.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mumok Archive

The exhibition “Contact M” of artist Park McArthur brings together, for the first time, artworks made between the 2010s and 2020s that questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shape this project’s format and purpose. The exhibition as an occasion to consider McArthur’s practice and presence among a recent generation of artists whose materialist and institutionally-responsive strategies refuse to separate critique from imagination. Introduced to a wider public with her solo exhibition of temporary ramps, disabled parking signage, and Wikipedia entry on disabled writer and activist Marta Russell (Ramps, 2014), McArthur’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions. Since then, processes of degeneration and dependency, as experiences filled with aesthetic possibility and formal invention, have been central to McArthur’s practice. The impossibility of experiencing the exhibition in its entirety is one of this multi-sited project’s propositions. By closely aligning each museum’s presentation and attempting to make the same show in more than one place at once, the exhibition confronts hierarchies of singularity, individuality, independence, and personhood. A more distant, but by no means less consequential means of experiencing the exhibition is via a new artwork that takes the form of a text and audio guide. Available onsite at the museums as well as on Museum Abteiberg’s and mumok’s websites for download and streaming, this guide is another means of presenting over a decade of artwork in more than one place simultaneously.

Photo: Park McArthur, Contact M at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Is this an investment, pied-à-terre, or primary residence?, 2018, Paint on wall, Altered Museum of Modern Art Projects logo scaled to gallery dimensions 9.8 x 59 m as installed at Museum Abteiberg, Courtesy of the artist,  Photo: Simon Vogel

Info: Mumok (museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien), Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 15/63-7/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mumok.at/ & Museum Abteiberg, Abteistraße 27 / Johannes-Cladders-Platz, Mönchengladbach, Germany, Duration: 15/3-28/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-22:00, museum-abteiberg.de/