A guided tour that ask visitors to look at the exhibited work differently. The museum offers a new way of deconstructing selected artworks and viewing them outside heteronormative assumptions.

Enter with Pride at the Albertina, Vienna

June is Pride Month, and the Albertina is leaning in. The museum is flying the Intersex-Inclusive Pride Flag on its grand staircase, and their "Queer Through the Museum" tours invite visitors to discover works and stories around identity, diversity, and social roles. It turns out the museum's own history is a good place to start.

The Albertina was founded by Duke Albert and Maria Christina - "Mimi," Empress Maria Theresa's favorite daughter. But before she married Albert, she was the muse of another woman. Her sister-in-law Isabella of Parma wrote her 200 letters confessing that she is madly in love with her.

Mimi's letters were destroyed after her death. But she kept Isabella's - and later shared them with her husband Albert. So this love survived: incomplete, preserved by the person who outlived it.

Walking through with a guide, familiar work suddenly asks new questions, Queer throughte Museum, Albertina, Vienna, 2026

Picasso: Françoise Gilot was 21, Picasso 61. He wanted her perpetually pregnant. In Lite with Picasso, Gilot would later describe his logic: constant pregnancy meant constant weakness, constant dependence. In Woman in a Green Hat, her body becomes a womb, a fertile object. But Françoise did what the others didn't: she left him in 1953.

The tour also led us to the "Care Matters" exhibition - care work, housework, unpaid labour, the art history of women since the 1970s. And it asks the same question: who is supposed to perform which roles, and why do we take that as natural?