As she was nearing the end of her six-year contract as director of Norway’s new National Museum, Karin Hindsbo started to ask herself: What next? Since 2017 the art historian and curator had been charged with the dream but gargantuan task of rehousing what was formerly several separate public art institutions in a mammoth new building, the largest museum in the Nordic region, home to 400,000 artifacts.
But with the doors thrown open and with her 50th birthday looming, maybe, she thought, it was time to do something different, something away from the art world, where she had spent the past three decades. After all, ever since her student days, she had promised herself never to “stay too long” or “get comfortable.” “At that point,” she says, “you need to look [at] yourself in the mirror and answer truthfully: ‘Do I have the best period ahead of me or behind me?’ ” The only thing that might make her reconsider, she joked with her husband and friends, was a call from Tate Modern.
The phone rang while she was away skiing with her family.
“I just sat there afterwards with my husband, like, ‘Tate Modern called?’ ” she recalls of her disbelief at being offered the directorship of the world’s most-visited modern art gallery. “It was crazy.”
When we meet, she has been in the job for a matter of weeks and is still settling in—both into her corner office, where cardboard boxes buckle under each other (“That’s on me,” the Dane says, sheepishly), and into her West Hampstead home, where she has relocated together with her two boys, aged 12 and 15, and her husband, Norwegian businessman Martin Smith-Sivertsen. How did her sons take the news? “They had a veto card,” she explains, sleek in art-world chic (cream cable-knit tank over black satin shirt; white trainers; black suit trousers), “so if I had known this was going to be devastating, then I would have taken that into consideration and maybe even said no.” A list of demands, notably season tickets—Tottenham for one, Arsenal for his brother—helped get the move over the line. (In hindsight, she says ruefully, she “caved too soon” on those.)
As for so many, some of Hindsbo’s most memorable art experiences have been here at Bankside, and—though she refuses any talk of favorite artists—she pinpoints the 2015 retrospective of the American abstract painter Agnes Martin as having made “the biggest impression.” “It’s like it’s vibrating,” she says of Martin’s work, hands snaking, the art lecturer in her (before her museum roles, she taught at the University of Copenhagen) visible. “[Her] pieces are alive in some kind of way.” Hindsbo’s predecessor, Frances Morris, who became the first female director of Tate Modern in 2016, made it her mission to put female artists—among them Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois, as well as Martin—front and center, and Hindsbo will naturally continue that work. “You can never get lazy and think, OK, now it’s just going to be like that, because it’s not,” she says. “You have to watch it all the time.”
Turkish artist Şükran Moral, whose feminist work has often “met with censorship,” worked with Hindsbo on a solo show at the Kode museum, Bergen, where Hindsbo was director. “But this time,” she said, “no one stopped me doing anything. Karin is very clever, prepared, and determined. Tate Modern [is] lucky to have her.”
Hindsbo is at pains, though, to point out that her tenure will not be “the Karin Hindsbo period”. What is important is the role of the museum now. “What an audience might need, I think, is different, even in the last five years,” she says. She references a 2019 WHO report that showed how “exposure to art and culture really improves both your physical and mental health, and I think coming out of COVID, that is an extremely important position to maintain.” So, too, does she believe that “there is a need for the museum to act as some kind of safe space, not secure and homogenic, but a place you can go where you can feel at home uttering your opinion, even though you know that at least three other people are having the exact opposite opinion.”
What is clear is that she will have nowhere near the kind of money she had to create the National Museum in Norway—a staggering £500 million. And environmental concerns—as well as financial—mean the days of “having 100 individual loans coming from all over the world by plane” are over. Instead, Hindsbo and her team will be thinking “about a circular economy in the show, about recycling what’s there and where to ship next.”
Ticket sales are more prized than ever, making programming a delicate balance between attracting a mainstream audience, and remaining true to Tate Modern as a place that “breaks boundaries and challenges itself.” Two 2024 exhibitions sum up this position: a Yoko Ono retrospective opening next month will no doubt bring in huge numbers from across generations and interests, while an exhibition of acclaimed South African photographer Zanele Muholi in June will give space to a lesser-known artist dealing in politically charged visual statements.
The question is, can Hindsbo bring visitor levels back to pre-pandemic peaks? This year she has a sky-high target: to get five million through the door (still over a million shy of the record-breaking numbers of 2019). Is she feeling the pressure? “To be honest,” she says, almost shrugging, “not at the moment? I probably will. I don’t feel pressure from the outside. It’s more that I put a little pressure on myself. Because under my watch, there’s no way this institution is going down or getting boring. That’s maybe what I’m most afraid of.”
When Hindsbo was growing up in Denmark, everyone, herself included, thought she would follow her parents, both biologists, into the world of science. But when she was accepted on a history of art degree, her fate was more or less sealed. “My mom was completely happy,” she says. “My dad has been supportive as well, but he just didn’t get it. In the end, he could tell maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.” She smiles. “I mean, it’s not the worst rebellion you can do.”
She is used to living away from Denmark, but not being able to hike Norway’s mountains will take some getting used to. “You walk and walk and it’s rainy and it’s tough. And then you get up there and suddenly,” her voice drops to a whisper, “it all kind of opens up. The world gets so big and you get so small. It’s an amazing experience.” Now, free time will be spent with her family, “watching movies, eating popcorn, going to concerts” (she just bought them all tickets to Wireless). “I couldn’t go for a long period without them,” she says. “I think [I would] crumble.” How does she manage a high-profile job with lots of travel, and being a mother to school-age children? “You’re not supposed to only do one thing,” is her thinking. “You’re not supposed to be 100 percent great at two things either: you need to work with yourself in lowering your expectations, or at least the expectation you feel from around.”
It’s a perspective that tallies with Hindsbo’s unflappable nature and the environment of understanding she wants to bring to Tate Modern. The day before, she made time to leave her office and stroll through the museum, “and there were a lot of people in the Turbine Hall, just lying there, looking up, and it’s like, my God, this is why we’re doing this,” she says. “This is magical.”