Maria Lind

Maria Lind (born in Stockholm in 1966) is a Swedish curator, art writer and educator. Since 2020, she has been the Counsellor of Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow. 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.