The Volkskundemuseum Wien/Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art is a museum dedicated to cultural history and historical and present everyday culture in Europe. As platform for the interaction of various academic disciplines and fields of arts, the museum provides an open space for researching and negotiating discourses in society.
Engaging with culture and its material manifestations, the museum is interested in everday life and life styles, images of the self and the alien, identities and imaginations, heterogeneity and hybridity, sovereignty of interpretation and the formation of elites, power relations and political constellations, social spaces and societal processes.
The museum collections originate from the former Habsburg crown lands and are continously extended, today counting more than 100.000 threedimensional objects and more than 200.000 photographies and graphics.
Established in 1896 Michael by Michael Haberlandt und Wilhelm Hein, the museum is situated in the Schönborn Garden Palace in the Josefstadt district of Vienna since 1917. As a cultural institution with roots in the 19th century, the museum has been under constant development and reorientation according to the respective academic, political and societal turns of the 20th century.
The permanent exhibition of 1994 shows objects of pre-industrial life in the former Habsburg monarchy. Various interventions create intriguing linkages between past and present.
Special exhibitions deal with historical and present themes of everyday life in a constantly changing Europe. Working together with external curators or taking part in international collaborations and projects, the museum experiments with forms of display and communication.
The museum offers an extensive cultural education programme for adults and children. It is further a place for film screenings, performances, academic conferences and much more.