Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. Since 2023, Lind is the director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Giron/Kiruna. From 2020 to 2023, she served as the counsellor of culture at the embassy of Sweden in Moscow. Prior to that, she was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta Konsthall, the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, the director of IASPIS in Stockholm and the director of Kunstverein München, Munich.
For over three decades, Lind has developed a distinct curatorial methodology that is art centred, process oriented and context sensitive. She expresses a staunch belief in art as a form of understanding the complexity of life, on par with science, politics and religion. Known for reimagining art institutions in ways that resonate with current artistic practices and social processes, her curatorial work has been associated, in a Northern and Western European context, with "new institutionalism". She has often brought attention to lesser-known artists and practices, including social practice, collective work and research-based art, anticipating their later acknowledgement in the art field.
Lind has sought to widen the frame of art, dedicating a considerable amount of her work and writings to infrastructure, institutional methodologies, collaborative networks, conditions of production, art funding, and so on. More recently, she has insisted on the importance of placing art and artists centre stage: “I have a distinct feeling that we need to return to art itself, to focus on artworks and art projects in the wake of institutions becoming more and more obsessed with themselves, curating programmes being preoccupied with curating and curatorial students becoming stuck with in curatorial pirouettes or symbiotic collaborations. Not that art has disappeared completely, but it has been pushed into the background.”
From 2011 to 2018, Lind was Director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; in 2019 she was co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara; in 2016 she was appointed artistic director for the eleventh Gwangju Bienniale, Gwangju. During the 2010s, she also held the position of Professor of Artistic Research at the Oslo Art Academy. Between 2008 and 2010 she was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; from 2003 to 2005 she was the Director of IASPIS (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden), Stockholm. From 2002 to 2004 she was the Director of Kunstverein München, Munich; from 1997 to 2001 she was a curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm; in 1998, she was co-curator of Manifesta 2, Luxembourg. In 2009, Lind received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. She has been an art critic at the national dailies Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, in addition to writing extensively for catalogues and other publications.
Curatorial work Maria Lind's curatorial approach is highly versatile. She has challenged institutional structures, experimented with curatorial formats, and written, published, and taught extensively, working across a range of scales and contexts. From the creation of an independent art space in a shopping mall (Salon 3, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, London, 1998–2000) to institutional leadership roles, Lind has engaged with the urgencies and specificities of place. As e-flux co-editor Brian Kuan Wood writes: “Using flexibility, duration, dislocation and displacement, and in particularly collaboration, each project is dealt with on its own terms, and the accounted for in a curated context. Indeed, while often conceived as isolated and structural solutions to problems posed in facilitating challenging work and making it public, from a curatorial perspective many of Lind's temporary and context-sensitive strategies can be considered paradigmatic in and of themselves.”
Writing and publishing Beginning with her early writing for the free entertainment newspaper City Nytt and subsequent art criticism for the national newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, Lind's writing developed as an integral aspect of her work as a medium to produce discourse, generate debate and attend to artworks and artists. She has co-edited numerous publications, producing translations and participating in efforts to reinstate the legacies of iconic women and feminist writers such as the Roma writer and activist Katarina Taikon (The Day I am Free: Katitzi, 2019; published in Russian in 2021) and Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai (Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai / Kollontai: A Play by Agneta Pleijel, 2020). The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008), Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets (2012) and Abstraction (2014) all address important tendencies in contemporary art, namely documentary approaches, commercialisation and abstraction. The anthology Situating the Curatorial, which she edited in 2012, takes a closer look at the notion of "the curatorial". Two volumes collect her writing: Selected Maria Lind Writing (2010) and Seven Years: The Rematerialisation of Art from 2011 to 2017 (2019). Her Konstringar: Vad gör samtidskonsten? (2021) published in Stockholm by Natur & Kultur, is an attempt at "popular education" on contemporary art in written form.
Pedagogy Education is an integral part of Lind's practice, and she has taught in various contexts since the late 1980s, from art history and fine art contexts to curatorial and writing programs. As the director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, she reshaped the curriculum to align more closely with contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, while also teaching coursework herself. She has taught two courses at Salzburg's Summer Academy. Since 2014, she has been a guest lecturer for the CuratorLab course at Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Stockholm, and for four years in the 2010s she was Professor of Artistic Research at the Oslo Art Academy. She has also co-initiated several educational initiatives, including the Gwangju Biennale Infra-School and the Art Encounters Biennial curating course in Timișoara. During her tenure at Tensta Konsthall, the institutions supported and hosted artist Ahmet Ögut's The Silent University. Lind has lectured widely across the world since the 1990s.
Curator, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1997–2001) In 1998 at Moderna Museet, Lind initiated a series of commissions, Moderna Museet Projects, making a point scarcely explored at the time: alongside thematic and retrospective exhibitions, an art museum can engage with contemporary art in multiple and fluid ways, in sync with the artists’ needs and artistic processes. As part of the series, over four years, twenty-nine artists were commissioned to make new works for the temporary project space in an old vicarage next door to the museum, or in locations chosen by the artists. Among the artists were Koo Jeong A, Ēriks Božis, Annika Eriksson, Peter Geschwind, Tobias Rehberger, Emese Benczúr, Simon Starling, Ann Lislegaard, Jason Dodge, Douglas Gordon, Claire Barclay, Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan, Elin Wikström, Liesbeth Bik & Jos van der Pol, Esra Ersen and Philippe Parreno. At Moderna Museet Lind also curated What If: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design with, among others, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jorge Pardo, Martin Boyce and Andrea Zittel. The exhibition was included in the book Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. Additionally, she co-curated a retrospective of Robert Smithson’s work and initiated the monthly monographic screening series Contemporary Film and Video. The latter occasioned the Swedish debut of moving image work by Jeroen de Rijke & Willem de Rooij, Pierre Huyghe, Monica Bonvicini, Matthew Buckingham, Fiona Tan, Jaki Irvine, and Deimantas Narkevicius, among others.
Director, Kunstverein München, Munich (2002–2004) During her directorship at Kunstverein München, Maria Lind and her team (Curator Sören Grammel, Assistant Curators Katarina Schlieben, Judith Schwarzbart, Tessa Praun and Julienne Lorz) privileged process, long-term Collaborations and collective thinking. A group of fifteen artists, curators and Critics (including Apolonija Šušteršič, Carey Young, Matts Leiderstam, Lynne Cooke and Jan Verwoert) acting as "Sputniks" (Fellow travellers), were invited to reimagine the role of this art institution and to work closely with it. The program also included projects by Oda Projesi, Bojan Šarčević and Chantal Akerman. Marion von Osten's research-based "project exhibition" Studio Europe was an early discussion on art and post-Fordism. Retrospectives with Christine Borland and Rirkrit Tiravanija experimented with the format of mid-career survey exhibitions. The group project Totally Motivated: A Sociocultural Manoeuvre was a playful collaboration between five curators and ten artists exploring the relationship between professional and amateur art practices.
Director, Iaspis (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden), Stockholm (2003–2005) At Iaspis, Maria Lind organised a programme of symposia and seminars engaging with research and addressing conditions of production in contemporary art and collaborative practices. These included the symposia "Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art” (co-curated with Joanna Billing and Lars Nilsson) with, among others, Anton Vidokle, Chto Delat (What Is to Be Done?) and STEALTH.unlimited; "Citizenship: Changing Conditions” with, among others, Chantal Mouffe and Stefan Jonsson; “Why Archives?”; “New Relation-alities”; “A Fiesta of Tough Choices”, co-curated with Tirdad Zolghadr; “Travelling Magazine Table”; and the seminar series “Tendencies in Time”. During her tenure, she co-edited the report European Cultural Policies 2015: A Report with Scenarios on the Future of Public Funding for Contemporary Art in Europe commissioned by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies and Iaspis.
Director, Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2008–2010) During her directorship of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Lind sought to engage students more directly with art and artists by introducing a number of new components to the curriculum. These included studio visits, an artists’ residency program (for example, residencies with Bernd Krauss and Marysia Lewandowska), hosting/supervision at CCS exhibitions, and mediation as a part of students’ final projects. Together with artist Hito Steyerl, she initiated the research project and exhibition The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art, with, among others, Yael Bartana, Haroun Farocki, Walid Raad, Omer Fast, Emily Jacir, Olivia Plender and Steven Shore. She also curated Philippe Parreno and the group show Personal Protocols and Other Preferences, with Esra Ersen, Michael Beutler and Kirstine Roeppsdorff. While her tenure coincided with a new generation of curators incubated by curatorial studies programmes, Lind acknowledged the limits to what such education can provide: “If there are three things that any education can help foster – methodology, discourse and networks – curating programmes typically offer only the latter two. They can help students acquire ways of talking about art, curating and related matters, and they allow for the formation of peer groups with whom it is possible to have valuable and long-term exchanges.”
Director, Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2011–2018)