We all watched the film and know that after museums close their exhibits come alive—and you don’t want to be a stranger in that funky universe.

But what if you wanted to build a dialogue, attempting to step into a fictional Northern Renaissance reality that awakens after the museum doors are shut? You’d probably want to show how your own universe looks and sounds, to establish some common ground with the 500-year-old figures emerging from the canvases.

So what could Bruegel, Cranach, Rubens, Steen, and Fyt possibly share with avant-garde music and modern art? Apparently, the same old aspirations, desires, and fears never grow tired.

To explore this, the Particolare Art Salon transformed Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum for one evening. Six contemporary sculptors were paired with Klangforum Wien musicians performing works by modern composers, staging a conversation across centuries with timeless masterpieces.

In the Bruegel Room, Anne de Vries’s The Great Turn (2022), with miniature knights and policemen, confronted the chaotic play of Children’s Games, while Judith Fliedl’s violin gave voice to Malin Bang’s fractured sound world, …när korpen vintsar. Next door, Lucca Süss filled the Cranach Room with uncanny hybrids of hair, resin, and metal, twisting armor into something monstrous, as Bernhard Zachhuber’s bass clarinet carried Doina Rotaru’s Metamorphosis.

Benjamin Hirte’s restrained blue stone and marble forms in the Steen Room spoke to Vienna’s social housing legacy, while Carmen Rodriguez’s double bass unfolded Jacob Druckman’s Valentine.

In Rubens’s Picture Gallery XIV, Hélène Fauquet’s delicate seashell prints entered into dialogue with Björn Wilker’s solo percussion, in works by Giacinto Scelsi and Wilker himself. In Picture Gallery XIII, Wendy Vo Cong Tri’s flute and Zachhuber’s clarinet were paired with Benjamin Hirte’s miniatures, reframing Rubens’s allegories through sound and sculptural detail.

The journey ended with Bruno Gironcoli’s sculptural abstraction in dialogue with Jan Fyt’s lush still lifes, under the breath of Toshio Hosokawa’s Kuroda-Bushi.

So, next time you roll out your sleeping bag to spend the night at the museum, imagine not just resting among statues and masterpieces, but waking them up. If the walls could speak, they would whisper of desires, fears, laughter—the same timeless questions we all carry. In the dark, we would find resonance: not only echoes of the past, but threads that tie us—artists, visitors, dreamers—across centuries.

Your next real “night at the museum” could be in London. From Saturday 25 October to Sunday 26 October 2025, the British Museum is hosting a family sleepover for children aged 8–15 and their parents under the title Spooktacular. Check the museum’s website for details.