The Gwangju Biennale Foundation held the 143^rd board of directors’ meeting and announced that the director of Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, Maria Lind, was appointed as the artistic director for the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. Maria Lind will start carrying out duties as the artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale once the director agreement contract is completed.

The foundation explained that Maria Lind has been exploring the role of a mediator between art and society on the basis that breaks away from the existing system and sets her apart from the others. Thus, it was decided that she was the most appropriate candidate in addressing the challenges of Gwangju Biennale and setting out a new vision. 

Maria Lind was born in 1966 and is based in Stockholm. She has been the director of Tensta Konsthall since 2011 and has carried out exhibitions as a co-curator at the gallery, including Frederick Kiesler: Visions at Work; The New Model with Dave Hullfish Bailey, Magnus Bartas, Ane Hjort Guttu, and Hito Steyerl; Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden; Meta and Regina: Two Magazine Sisters in Crime; The Paths to the Commons are Infinite by Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, and also for solo exhibitions with Iman Issa, Bernd Krauss and Hinrich Sachs. Also, Lind was the curator of Future Light in 2015 with Rana Begum, Elena Damiani, Shezad Dawood, Mounir Farmanfarmaian, Amalia Pica, Yelena Popova, Haegue Yang and others, as part of the first Vienna Biennial at the MAK and Kunsthalle Wien.

Since 2010, Lind curated Abstract Possible, a research project on abstraction, taking contemporary art as its starting point with exhibitions in Malmö Konsthall 2010, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City 2011, White Space Zurich 2011, Eastside Projects, Birmingham 2012, and Tensta Konsthall 2012. Between 2005 and 2007, she was also the director of IASPIS (International Artist Studio Program in Sweden) in Stockholm, where she curated for exhibitions with Andrea Geyer, Ibon Aranberri, Tommy Stöckel and Saskia Holmkvist and co-curated for the symposia, Taking the Matter Into Common Hands: On Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art. From 2002 to 2004, she was the director of Kunstverein M\FC;nchen where she, together with a curatorial team, ran a program which involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Annika Eriksson, Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno and Marion von Osten. Prior to that, Lind was the curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and, in 1998, a co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe's Biennale of contemporary art from 1997-2001.

Additionally, Lind has taught extensively and contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogues and other publications. Lind was a director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College from 2008 to 2010, served as an academic advisor of Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2013, and, currently, is a professor of research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In terms of publications, she is the co-editor of the books:Curating with Light Luggage and Collected Newsletter; Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art, European Cultural Policies 2015;and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. 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.

Furthermore, she won the Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement in 2009 and was a board member of IKT from 2006 to 2011. She holds an MA in Art History and Russian in 1990 from the University of Stockholm. From 1995-1996, Lind, was a student at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

More importantly, Maria Lind has had a special relationship with the city of Gwangju. She participated in the International Workshop of Asian Culture Complex as a speaker in 2010 and served as an academic advisor of Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2013. Such experiences raise expectations that she will successfully harmonize the local culture and the global culture, which is a challenge for the Gwangju Biennale, but, ultimately, forming a discourse of a new era.

Media Contact:

Ashley Park

International Relations and Communications Manager 
Gwangju Biennale Foundation 
Tel: +82 (0) 62 608 4223 / Fax: +82 (0) 62 608 4229

ashley.park@gwangjubiennale.org