Positioning Symposium: Ute Meta Bauer and Maria Lind

At the turn of September and October, PUBLICS will launch a new international seminar series on curatorial thinking, the Positioning Symposium. The seminar will be organized in collaboration with museums, art organizations, and an extensive network of curators from the Nordic and Baltic countries. One of the partners is IHME Helsinki.

The program includes international speakers, commissioned works, and reading circles open to everyone. The extensive group of speakers also includes members of IHME Helsinki’s advisory board, Professor Ute Meta Bauer and museum director Maria Lind, who are both also curators.

Ute Meta Bauer is a professor at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) School of Art, Design and Media and acting director and principal fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, where she served as founding director for over a decade. She has been involved in building art institutions and academic programs for over 40 years, including NTU CCA Singapore and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Art, Culture and Technology program. Bauer has curated international biennials and exhibitions, such as Documenta11, the 17^th Istanbul Biennial and 3^rd Berlin Biennale, and the Norwegian, US, and Singapore National Pavilions at the Venice Art Biennale. More recently, she was the artistic director of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She has also curated major contemporary art exhibitions and has edited and authored numerous publications in the field of contemporary art. Bauer has been a member of IHME’s advisory board since autumn 2018. In 2025, Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture awarded her an honorary doctorate.

At the Positioning Symposium, Bauer’s presentation examines curatorial practice as a political activity that responds to the ethical and social challenges of the times. She reviews and reflects on key projects throughout her career from the 1990s to the present day. Over the past decade, her work at NTU CCA Singapore has focused on the ongoing climate crisis. For Bauer, an exhibition constructs an architecture of discourse—a space where different realities overlap. The curatorial process constructs and challenges systems that reflect structures of social and environmental inequality, while simultaneously opening up opportunities for solidarity, advocacy, and change. Bauer’s presentation is on Thursday 2 October at 14:20 in Kiasma.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator from Stockholm. She is currently the director of Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kiruna, Sweden. From 2020 to 2023, she worked as the counsellor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow, and previously as director of Tensta konsthall (2011–2018), artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and director of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies postgraduate program at Bard College (2008–2010). Lind has taught extensively at various art schools, including as a professor of artistic research at the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts, and a lecturer at Konstfack’s CuratorLab. She has written on contemporary art for newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogs, and other publications. Maria Lind has been a member of the IHME Helsinki advisory board since January 2024. In 2009, she was awarded the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

In her presentation, Lind shares her experiences as a director in various institutional environments and reflects on curatorial work from the perspective of local, regional, and global place-bound knowledge. She presents case studies from, among others, Kunstverein München and her role as the counsellor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow. The presentation will address concepts such as displacement, art-centricity, embeddedness, pervasive eclecticism, and the proximity principle. Lind’s presentation is on Tuesday 30 September at 15:30 in Amos Rex.

Admission to the event is free.

There will be a guided tour of IHME Helsinki Commission 2025 – Zhanna Kadyrova’s The Forest exhibition – for Symposium participants at 10:00–11:30 on Monday, September 29