Maria Lind: From the Work Floor of an Aspiring Institution

Maria Lind, director of Tensta konsthall, will present and discuss the art-centric activities of this konsthall located in a late modernist suburb of Stockholm from both a practical and theoretical point of view. As a small visual arts organisation run as a private foundation, Tensta konsthall is dealing with contemporary art, its curation and mediation while being simultaneously embedded in a residential area and connected to international debates on art and the rest. What are the challenges and benefits? Contradictions and pieces of cake?

Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator based in Stockholm. She is the director of Tensta konsthall, Stockholm, and the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale. She was director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010) and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München where, together with a curatorial team including the curator Sören Grammel, she ran a program including artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Annika Eriksson, Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno and Marion von Osten. From 1997-2001 she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, responsible for Moderna Museet Projecs with 29 commissions with among others Simon Starling, Apolonija Sustersic, Koo Jeong-a and Matts Leiderstam, and, in 1998, co-curator of Manifesta 2. She has taught widely since the early 1990s, for example at the Art Academy in Munich and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Until 2017 she was professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogues and other publications. Among her recent co-edited publications are Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art, and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, all at Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series Documents on Contemporary Art. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In the fall of 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press.

Please note: The lecture by Maria Lind will take place in collaboration with Trondheim Kunstmuseum on Tuesday, October 23, 4pm. The venue is Overlyssalen in TKM Bispegata. Admission free.

Portrait of Maria Lind by Bernd Krauss.