Queer Museum Vienna is a cultural initiative and museum project in Vienna, Austria, dedicated to queer art, culture and history. It first appeared publicly in January 2022 as a temporary guest project at the Volkskundemuseum Wien. Contemporary Austrian media described the project as a museum initiative intended to give greater visibility to queer art and culture in Vienna.
History
Discussions about establishing a queer museum in Vienna had been taking place since 2019, according to FM4. Because the initiative did not yet have a fixed location, it was hosted temporarily by the Volkskundemuseum Wien, where it was given two rooms for exhibitions and events. ORF Wien described the opening in January 2022 as the first queer museum in Vienna.
The first exhibition shown in the Volkskundemuseum rooms was If there is something weird in your neighborhood by Alfred Rottensteiner, curated by The DODO Project. FM4 presented the exhibition as a preview of what a future queer museum in Vienna might look like, while noting that the temporary rooms could not yet represent the full range of queer art.
After being hosted by the Volkskundemuseum Wien from January 2022 to August 2023, Queer Museum Vienna moved to rooms at the Otto Wagner Areal in November 2023. In 2024, Wien Holding reported on the exhibition Is Queer Political? at the Queer Museum Vienna at the Otto Wagner Areal, giving the location as Baumgartner Höhe 1 in Vienna's 14th district.
About
Queer Museum Vienna is a non-profit, self-organized collective that serves as an anchor for queer urban history and contemporary queer art, with an anti-patriarchal focus on research, education, community building and inclusivity. It questions forms of oppression based on gender and sexuality while promoting diversity through exhibitions, collaborations and non-normative organization.
Programme
The museum's programme includes exhibitions, talks, public lectures, film screenings, educational programmes and other events dealing with queer art, culture and community life. During its guest period at the Volkskundemuseum, FM4 reported that the project planned rapidly changing exhibitions and events with different focuses, including programming for Black History Month.
In 2026, Queer Museum Vienna launched What’s Missing?, a lecture series on queer art history curated by Kero Fichter, Florian Aschka, and Eugenia Seleznova. The series was later discussed in Zebrabutter and in Benno Hilgers’s essay “Queer Art History as Institutional Critique” as a public-facing programme concerned with gaps in art-historical representation and queer visibility in museums and archives.
Awards
In 2022, Queer Museum Vienna received the main Preis der freien Szene Wiens for Queer Museum @ Volkskundemuseum Wien. The prize was awarded by IG Kultur Wien and funded by the City of Vienna.
References
External links