The Museum of (Non)Restitution

From September 20 to November 16, Salzburger Kunstverein is pleased to present the final exhibition of its 2025 program Picturing Justice.

The Museum of (Non)Restitution
Thomas Geiger, Tatiana Lecomte, Sophie Thun 
with restitution objects from the Collection of the Salzburg Museum.

Co-produced by Salzburg Museum—Gastspiel and Salzburger Kunstverein—Picturing Justice 2025. Curated by Mirela Baciak, Katja Mittendorfer-Oppolzer, and Susanne Rolinek.

The “non” in The Museum of (Non)Restitution signals the show’s central concern: restitution as an unfinished process. In Salzburg—a city long practiced in staging cultural history—the exhibition presents restitution as a conflicted subject matter, as much about concealment as revelation, as much about stories withheld as those retold. Here, non-restitution is not refusal, but a reminder that remembrance remains partial—shaped as much by what society chooses to forget as by what it recalls.

Co-produced by Salzburg Museum and Salzburger Kunstverein, this project brings together three new commissions by Thomas Geiger, Tatiana Lecomte, and Sophie Thun, along with restitution objects, to offer a confrontation with what restitution can and cannot repair.

Thomas Geiger turns our attention to the networks of theft and memory. His wall drawing A Cartography of Theft maps the Nazi plunder of artworks as a sociogram, radiating from Salzburg into Europe, showcasing how the past continues to operate in the present. In his video Dunkelheit (Darkness), filmed inside the Altaussee salt mine—where the Nazis stored more than 6,500 looted works—he addresses darkness itself as both witness and accomplice.

Tatiana Lecomte, meanwhile, interrogates photography’s role in making herstory. In Gott segne das Jahr 1942. Helene Taussig und ihr Haus, she recreates the contours of the modernist home in Anif once owned by Helene Taussig (1879–1942), an Austrian painter of Jewish descent and devout Catholic convert, whose life was shattered by Nazi persecution. The house was seized and „Aryanised“ by Nazi art dealer Kajetan Mühlmann, later occupied by his ex-wife Leopoldine Wojtek, and restituted only in 1953 following protracted legal proceedings. The spectral outline, taken from a 1935 photograph, conjures both dispossession and erasure. Shown with a painting by Taussig, the work evokes her last lived world and recalls her deportation to the Izbica ghetto in 1942, where she disappeared without trace.

Sophie Thun turns to the question of presence and its afterimage. She evokes Salzburg Museum’s storage depot, monumentalising its shelving with analogue photographs. On these racks rest objects in different stages of restitution: some already returned, others awaiting their transfer back to private hands. Another installation are two paintings by Hans Makart, longterm loans at the Salzburg Museum, recently revealed to be studio copies rather than the Polish originals looted during the Nazi occupation in Poland in 1944. Prints of the missing artworks—derived from blurred archival photographs—confront viewers with what can no longer be seen. A wardrobe from the Museum, originally used for collecting toys, positioned nearby extends this inquiry: images from the platform lootedart.com are hidden inside, to be discovered only by looking through a peephole. If the shelves represent the authority of institutional storage, the wardrobe evokes the privately withheld.

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