Pushkin House is delighted to welcome internationally renowned curator, art historian, and educator Maria Lind for a wide-ranging conversation on the agency, ethics, and future of cultural institutions.

Throughout a distinguished professional trajectory spanning the directorship of Tensta konsthall, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Lind has consistently questioned standard institutional models. Recently, her work has taken this inquiry to geographical extremes: curating near and beyond the Arctic Circle at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Giron/Kiruna, and working in close, sustained dialogue with Sámi and Indigenous artists, land defenders, and local historians.

From the resource-extraction borders of the frozen North to suburban public housing estates in Stockholm, Lind’s methodology asks what happens when an institution shifts its gaze from imperial centres to peripheral, contested territories. How can contemporary art navigate Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial legacies, and fragile ecologies without instrumentalising them? And how can a hyper-local, grounded practice connect meaningfully to broader transnational struggles?
Lind’s experiences at the geographical margins will be in dialogue with Pushkin House’s own trajectory: exploring how an independent institution can serve as a hospitable threshold, rooted in local communities while addressing questions of displacement, memory and belonging.

The talk will be followed by a moderated discussion with Pushkin House Director Elena Sudakova, audience Q&A, and drinks. This event is part of the Frame programme: convening curators, artists, creatives, and thinkers to examine the evolving agency of art and the responsibilities of cultural workers.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. Since 2023, Lind has been 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 this 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. 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.

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