each season, vienna state opera turns its safety curtain into a work of contemporary art

Safety Curtain series at the Vienna State Opera

For nearly three decades, museum in progress and the Vienna State Opera have brought contemporary art into the theater with their Safety Curtain series. In traditional theaters, the safety curtain is the heavy barrier that separates the stage from the audience in the case of an emergency. Looking at the four borders of the curtain conjures the idea of a picture frame or a typical quadrilateral canvas that contains works of visual art. Seeing this as a site of opportunity, Safety Curtain has welcomed the likes of Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, and Cao Fei, facilitating an annual encounter between the performing and visual arts.

David Hockney, 2012, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2012/2013, large-scale picture | all images © museum in progress unless stated otherwise

the first Safety Curtain in the 1998/1999 season

The inaugural project in the Safety Curtain series came in the 1998/1999 season with Kara Walker’s installation. The American artist’s work often confronts the country’s violent history with slavery, most notably leveraging silhouetted figures that reflect on narratives of Blackness in the antebellum South. Typically, the Safety Curtains are accompanied by texts and interviews that contextualize the work within the Opera and the artist’s greater practice. In 1998, curator Nancy Spector wrote on Walker’s work, explaining its relationship to minstrel shows, the American Civil War, and Blackness in America. She writes, ‘Walker’s approach to her subject matter operates on the level of “entertainment” – it is raucously humorous and bitterly sarcastic. Her commission to design a curtain for the Vienna State Opera brings her own sources in early American theater tantalizingly to the surface.’

John Baldessari, Graduation, 2017, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2017/2018, large-scale picture (also header image)

Creating Visual Work in a Space for Performance

In highlighting how Walker leveraged the theatrical setting in her piece, Spector foreshadows what will be a defining element of the Safety Curtain series: artists making use of the scale and dramatics of the operatic setting. In 2017, curator and critic Bice Curiger, in another essay written in conjunction with the project, maps the terrain the Curtains exist within, discussing artists that have made use of this peculiar, yet ripe, visual space. She identifies the Safety Curtain as occupying the same terrain as the ‘fourth wall,’ the metaphorical and physical barrier between spectator and stage. Additionally, the expectant audience and the preparation ahead of a show can be a landscape of distractions.

Given this, Curiger acknowledges that, ‘The conditions for confronting the work are nevertheless excellent: at the very least, the viewer is dealing with non-authoritative, unconventional monumentality. In spite of this power, however, the pictorial message has to come through, not least because of the potential for distraction and the heterogeneous audience.’

El Anatsui, XOHANAMI, 2025, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2025/2026, large-scale picture

Herbert Brandl for the 2026/2027 Season

In 2026, Herbert Brandl joins the ranks of the Safety Curtain’s lineup of contemporary artists. The jury—Daniel Birnbaum, Bice Curiger, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist—selected the late Austrian painter, who contributed a massive blue-and-white work for the Opera’s stage. The curtains remain throughout the entire season, starting from the fall and continuing into the summer of the following year. It’s visible before the performance, during intermission, and after the curtains close, giving audiences three opportunities within the span of the show to view the work.

In her analysis of Brandl’s curtain, curator Cathérine Hug identifies within the duochromatic painting its origins in space exploration and the depiction of the Blue Marble, or the capturing of Earth from the perspective of space. ‘It is this change in perspective achieved by leaving the Earth and flying above it, the so-called “overview effect”, that so fascinated Herbert Brandl and enables us to reflect collectively on the fragility of life,’ she writes, decoding the swirling whites that appear upon the stage.

Herbert Brandl, 2023/26, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2026/2027, large-scale picture

The Legacy of the Curtains

In the decade since its inception, Safety Curtain works have played with, subverted, and reinvented the frame upon which the Vienna State Opera’s performances take place. There’s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 2006/2007 work Fear Eats the Soul, which makes use of the rainbow television test card, invoking the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or in its original German, ‘Angst essen Seele auf,’ which appears on the curtain itself. Similarly calling on the language of media, David Hockney’s 2012/2013 piece, created on an iPad, depicts a theater within a theater, loose curtains depicted in curving lines open up to reveal a stage with the words ‘Wien Musik’ dancing across a pile of colorful geometries. In each iteration, these art-world actors stage an exhibition that continues to advance the conversation on art, spectacle, and performance.

Anselm Kiefer, 2023 Safety Curtain

Cy Twombly, Bacchus, 2010, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2010/2011, large-scale picture

Cy Twombly, 2010 Safety Curtain

Joan Jonas, 2014, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2014/2015, large-scale picture

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Joan Jonas, 2014 Safety Curtain

Tauba Auerbach, A Flexible Fabric of Inflexible Parts III, 2016, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2016/2017, large scale picture

Tauba Auerbach, 2016 Safety Curtain

Cao Fei, The New Angel, 2022, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2022/2023, large-scale picture

Cao Fei, 2022 The New Angel

Pipilotti Rist, Abdominal cavity flies over a dam, 2024, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2024/2025, large-scale picture

Pipilotti Rist, 2024 Safety Curtain

Cerith Wyn Evans, 2011, Safety Curtain, museum in progress, Vienna State Opera, 2011/2012, large-scale picture

Cerith Wyn Evans, 2011 Safety Curtain

project info:

name: Safety Curtain

location: Vienna State Opera, Austria | @wienerstaatsoper

conceived by: museum in progress | @museuminprogress

date: 1998 – ongoing

29^th safety curtain artist: Herbert Brandl

29^th safety curtain jury: Daniel Birnbaum, Bice Curiger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist

This article is part of designboom’s SPECTATOR AND SPECTACLE chapter, asking how wonder gets built, presented in partnership with SolidNature, and how it might return some mystery to a world that has measured most of it away. Discover more stories that turn onlookers into participants, alter perception and disrupt the everyday here.