A conversation between Maria Lind and Hyejung Jang

ML : Maria Lind
HJ : Hyejung Jang

HJ
In your article “The Curatorial” (2009, Artforum), you mentioned that curatorial is the way of linking objects or people and everything in different ideas, which I agree with. Creating networking is not about building the power of relationships, it’s just sharing the knowledge that you mentioned, and we can teach each other, learn from each other and that’s important. It’s been a while since you wrote this article, is this idea still valid for your curatorial?

ML
Yes, to myself at least this remains relevant.
How to combine things in order to be able to question the status quo. My curatorial practice is about not taking the status quo for granted, and asking questions that make new connections and suggestions.

HJ
Your curatorial attitude has appeared and resonated strongly not only through individual projects but also through the entire program or mission of the institutions you’ve worked at, such as Tensta Konsthall(from 2011 to 2018), where you worked for a long time in the past, and Kin Museum of Contemporary Art (Kin / from 2023 to present), where you recently joined. This is not common and seems to me to be an exemplary practice. Perhaps I could start by asking you about Kin, where you are now working, to ask about your current curatorial direction.

ML
Kin Museum of Contemporary Art is in Kiruna. It’s the northernmost municipality in Sweden. The town itself has 18,000 inhabitants approximately and the municipality 23,000 inhabitants. So it’s small and extremely interesting, extremely relevant today because many of the big questions of our time are played out in front of our eyes. Activism with a mind to indigenous rights. This is the heartland of the Sami people which is Europe’s only indigenous people. And Supmi, the land of the Sami people stretches from Norway through Sweden and Finland and then Russia. So Kirna is really in the middle of the Swedish side in this area. You probably have heard that climate change is accelerating the closer you get to the poles. So you feed more there than further south. And at the moment the swings in weather it’s something we’re experiencing every month. So it goes from being really cold to really warm. Wow and for example, for the Sami people, many of whom are reindeer herders this causes problems because when it gets warmer, the snow melts and then it freezes, and this means that you get a thin layer of ice on top of the snow and then the reindeer cannot dig down and eat what is on the ground. So it’s just one little example of the challenges that climate change is causing.

The Kin Museum is a small museum located within the Kiruna town hall, and this new town hall is part of a unique transformation of the town. Kiruna was founded as a mining town around 1900, and the mine is the largest underground iron mine in the world. It’s so big that there was a danger that one part of the old town would collapse, so they moved part of the town about four kilometers away, and that new town is where the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art is now. When they moved, some buildings have been taken apart and put up again, yet other ones have been dismantled and demolished and then they built replicas and then there are many totally new buildings in the new town. It’s a special urban experiment.

By that time when the museum established then people were kind of missioning that wanting to address that kind of all the social issue through that art and the museum a little bit. The mission statement reads a little bit like you say that the museum should work with contemporary art and collect contemporary art with the Barents Region as a point of departure. (*Barents Region is consisted of northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and North-West Russia.) And then we’re interweaving the local, the regional, the national and the international. So, it all comes together. And the mission statement also talks about art as a social agent and that it is an important factor in society basically which is a nice mission statement.

HJ
It’s distinct that you’re always thinking about the role of art in society and trying to come up with suggestions to make things better, and that’s also true of your practice as an educator. That’s what led me to invite you to this dialogue; my question to you is about the relationship between the pure value of art, which is very vague and abstract, and the social role of art, which is relatively concrete and describable.

ML
You think that they’re two different things. But I would say that in my mind it’s one and the same. Diverse types of works and this was important and still important for me to try and think about how art is radically heterogeneous, and that art is operating in very different ways. But what it shares is this capacity to ask difficult questions, and to propose new models however small scale they are, in other words, introducing thinking around how things can be different. And this is something that has followed me all along until now.

And my time and experiences in Russia before I moved back to Sweden changed me a lot and strengthened my perception and belief in art. I was working as the counselor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow and my first day in the office was in August 2020. It happened to be the day when Alexei Navalny was poisoned on the airplane above Siberia if you remember. And between, of course, there was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine starting on the 24th of February in 2022. It was a really dramatic period. I feel that it was changing my life to be so close to enormous, enormously tragic events. So you could say that I lived through Russia being an authoritarian society to becoming totalitarian to becoming a dictatorship because I do believe that it is a dictatorship right now and cultural life was involved with this and I could see how the repressions were increasing.

We are in a bad place in the world right now, certainly the Global South where people have experienced difficult things for a long time. But the way things are being heightened and intensified right now and not to speak about the genocide that is going on in Gaza at the moment it is really abominable and I’m having a hard time seeing a way out in the short term. Perhaps I can add that in the midst of this horror that is going on in many places currently. Art still has this capacity to help us relate to and deal with the reality that we are in. It can facilitate understanding questions and thinking 1~4 steps further on. It’s essential that we keep on looking at art, discussing art, and that artists are able to make art even from Gaza.

HJ
I deeply agree with, and I think it’s essential to think about how art can be delivered, or how art can be accessible. Contemporary art is still often disconnected from the public/society; the public/society that we want “the art” here we’re talking about to reach. But I believe that the greatest value of contemporary art is that it should communicate with the public and with society in an everyday way. It doesn’t have to be fancy or grandiose, it just has to be horizontal and not vertical, like sharing knowledge and asking questions about everything that happens around us. Are there any particular educational programs or strategies in your curatorial work and at the institutions you work at?

ML
That’s a great question. Particularly after my time as the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College, which is in upstate New York, I’ve been working more and more with what I call mediation and I think of it as a mix of programming, and education outreach. Mediation for me is a way in which you can facilitate the contact between artworks and viewers or participants because sometimes in contemporary art, as you indicated, it’s not necessarily a viewer but somebody who’s participating. This can be done in many different ways and should be done in many different ways because I believe that the starting point should be the artworks and their way of functioning, their logic, their sensibility so to speak.

And we did that in Gwangju for the biennale. I need to underline that in every place that I worked and what has been done, there has been a team effort. In Gwangju, we had a curatorial team with one curator, Bina Choi, and three assistant curators Azar Mahmoudian, Margarida Mendes, and Michelle Wong. We developed many things together and we agreed that mediation is crucial. So we devised many different strategies to do that. So instead of having a so-called educational arm of this edition of the biennial, we created Infra-School and Binna Choi took the lead on that. We collaborated with universities and art schools in both Gwangju and Seoul. We as a curatorial team also the artists that we had invited to the biennale came to these universities and academies and did seminars, lectures, artists, presentations etcetera there. And altogether that formed an Infra-School.

We wanted to get in touch with those who are living and working near the biennale building on the outskirts of the city. We did one t time with a biennale with the teachers in the neighborhood and another one with the people living in the buildings really literally next door and who are often spending time on the big square in front of the biennale building. A third one was with the shop owners and restaurant owners in the vicinity. It was very simple. The participants of the conversation are the curatorial team, the foundation, and those people from the neighborhood. We just had tea together and talked about art and plans for the biennale and they asked questions, and we could answer. These are just two examples of how to go about this, and some of this I also borrowed from my tenure as the director of Tensta Konsthall. I’m certainly continuing also now in Kiruna, but it always has to be adjusted to and sensitive to the local context.

HJ
This naturally led to a conversation about the Gwangju Biennale, and I’d like to continue with this question, because I think it’s not just me, but a growing number of people in recent years have been questioning about mega-scale, biennale, triennial projects. They’ve become acutely aware of the current predicament of the contemporary art world, which is increasingly conforming to the biennale mechanism, and they’ve reflected/criticized the failure of some biennales over the last 30 years to come up with creative theoretical visions that would allow them to engage in meaningful dialogue with the contemporary era.

ML
They come with pros and cons. I think a large-scale exhibition is interesting and useful because it can make an impact and it can have resonance beyond a smaller circle. The Gwangju Biennale is a prime example. It’s considered the largest contemporary art event in Asia. What an amazing instrument to play with if you have access to it?

We used it by really making an exhibition in the biennial building but an exhibition which also wanted to play with curatorial models. Each floor in this building is like a white cube, a very big white cube so they’re on top of each other and have a different character. One was consciously totally mixed so you had sculpture, video, painting, installation mixed and no constructed walls to divide the works. So, the works were each other’s neighbors so to speak another floor was playing with the light so there were works which were including light so we did not add any additional lighting. This was video and slide projections and an installation with lights inside. We covered the floor with the black carpet, the walls with the, with black curtains. And for me this was an important experiment because I was always wondering why artworks in big exhibitions in particular always have to be separated from one another. Why do they have to have their own cubicles? Obviously, you have concerns to do with lights you have concerns to do with sound. But I wanted to see if we could still, we could provide that type of focus that each works requires with the fact that when you were looking at one work, you could always in the corner of your eyes see another work.

Another way which I’m still proud of is the Gwangju Biennale fellows that we invited. They were 100 super interesting small-scale institutions across the world working with contemporary art, often in close connection to their locations, to their contexts. And we wrote to them and asked them, can we nominate you as Gwangju Biennale fellows? This means that we would like to shed light on your fantastic work. We don’t ask you to make anything to produce anything we’re not asking that you’re showing artists that are invited to the biennale. We only want to shed light on you and to express to the world that what you do is important.

We invited them to come to Gwangju Biennale for a big gathering at the time of the opening. So around 60 of them came. I was at the time thinking of this as a network that could also be a bit like sleeping cells. In harder times we will need each other. We will need each other as a solidarity network, as a support structure. And as the world is getting tougher and tougher, I’m more and more often thinking about these Gwangju Biennale fellows and what we could potentially do for and with each other not necessarily literally collaborating but to be in touch to share knowledge, to share experience.

What could that mean today? What I want to say is that although I’m often also critical of large-scale events like biennials, you can use them in relevant ways.

HJ
I hear you, perhaps my complaint is more about the practices that have already become mechanized and the environment or common idea that has been created around them. As you mentioned, Gwangju Biennale is the largest biennale base in Asia. Can you give us some more thoughts on the role and meaning of Gwangju Biennale as the largest biennale in Asia?

ML
Yes, not only is it the biggest, but it’s also potentially the most interesting and I think it is connected to its history as a memorial to the Gwangju uprising in May of 1980. So, if that is the reason for the biennial being remembering the incredible heroic resistance of the citizens of Gwangju against the military as the military was commanded by the government to attack the inhabitants.
This is not just any beginning, it’s incredible and I felt that strongly when we did the 2016 edition. And I believe that many of the artistic directors have kept that in mind. And that also means that compared to many other biennials not only in Asia but also elsewhere that the relationship between this biennial and the city is stronger. But that’s a good thing.

HJ
Yes, it’s a good thing. But as a younger curator based in Korea, on the one hand, I cannot stop questioning how long I should let that relationship go on.

ML
That’s a relevant question. I’m not sure if you have to deal with it all the time but it affects how you think about what you’re doing because there’s a certain ethnic there’s a certain attitude involved with that history. And if you keep that in mind, I think you work in certain ways so you may not make a particular type of blockbuster you know, I believe it has the potential of making the artistic directors and the curatorial teams a bit more sensitized to how you take on a task like curating a big biennale.

HJ
It would be great if you could share your thoughts on the approach and role of the artistic director as a foreigner or a stranger.

ML
I would maybe say an outsider rather than a stranger. As a starting point I think one has to acknowledge that one comes from a different context and that can be far away or closer. Maybe it’s also different from a curator from Seoul to do something in Gwangju for instance. And in my case, I came from a faraway place which is historically, culturally, socially, economically etcetera very different from the context of Korea and Gwangju. At the same time, you can always find points of contact and create what we talked about in the catalogue of the Biennale as a Contact Zone a notion that we borrowed both from Marianne not Straus, but something like that and the anthropologist James Clifford.

Contact Zone is areas, spheres where differences can meet and engage with one another. And I think we managed to create something like several such contact zones around the Biennale. For me the key to working like that is to meet with people, spend time with them and show some sincere curiosity in a way it’s basic if you show an interest in other people that is for real so to speak, then they tend to show an interest in you and what you’re doing as well. So, it is a lot to do with, even if it’s a large-scale event like the Gwangju Biennale, to take the time to look at things on site, to visit, to participate in different things to talk to people. That is, it’s a useful starting point.

HJ
Although we are containing lots of elements for the audience to link with artwork or artists, as you just mentioned, if the exhibition contained lots of components, maybe sometimes the audience would still get lost in the exhibition. Is there any secret way to make them not get lost. Or is it okay to be lost at all?

ML
Precisely to be lost is not necessarily a bad thing when you do not understand something. I think that is actually a beautiful starting point because then you have to scratch the surface, you have to dig into something. So I would embrace that not that people should be completely confused but to have a sense of not getting everything is positive for me. And think of what it means to go to a supermarket or a football game the first time if you are not used to it and if you’re not really prepared, it’s completely confusing. But you get used to it. So it’s so much about the habit and also maybe of seeing things, experiencing things together with someone with whom you can have a conversation.

HJ
Who can be the one they can have a conversation with?

ML
The hosts at an institution, the person at the reception if there are hosts in the space, guided tours with the curator or the mediators of the institution. That’s why it’s also so important to have events where people gather and talk about things. So basically, everything I do these days includes plenty of discursive events. I talk about mediation, different forms of mediation for diversity.