Talk by Stockholm-based curator and critic Maria Lind.
Exhibitions are where artworks meet their publics. In Asia, with the general absence of systematic public collections and few academic art history departments, exhibitions are more than just sites of display and interaction. Exhibitions—and the curatorial strategies shaping them, institutional demands driving them, and art writing accompanying them—have become the primary sites of art historical construction.
Complementing the latest issue of Field Notes, 'Publics, Histories, Value: The Changing Stakes of Exhibitions' is a talk series featuring international and Hong Kong-based curators, educators, and artists responding to and enriching the contents of the e-journal.
The inaugural speaker, curator and critic Maria Lind, explores the relationship between education and exhibition making. What promise does accreditation hold in validating the role, work, and career of a curator? What makes this practice outdated, necessary, or urgent now? Does the relevance of this activity change according to the time, place, and context of where it is located?
Courtesy of Harbour City Hong Kong.
Maria Lind is a curator and critic, and present director of Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden. From 2008-2010 she was director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and has also served as director of lASPIS, Stockholm (2005-2007) and Kunstverein München, Germany (2002-2004). She was co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe's biennale of contemporary art (1998) and was responsible for numerous commissions as curator of Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1997-2001). Lind received the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2009, and among her many written and editorial contributions, Selected Maria Lind Writing (Sternberg Press, 2010) is a compendium of her essays to date.
The fourth issue of Field Notes, 'Publics, Histories, Value: The Changing Stakes of Exhibitions' takes as its point of departure, the 2013 symposium Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the Making of Recent Art History in Asia, and carries the exploration forward to an expanded set of geographies, models, and ideas to emphasise alternative ways of seeing and approaching exhibitions, and their contribution to the writing of multiple histories of art today.
