As she neared the end of her six year contract as Director of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Karin Hindsbo was in reflective mood. Perhaps now was the time to move away from museums; after all, the Danish-born art historian had just completed the mammoth task of bringing together four separate Norwegian institutions, with a combined collection of 400,000 objects, into one newly constructed mega-museum with a staggering budget of £400m. It was a lot.
The only thing that could make her change her mind, she joked to her friends and family, would be if Tate Modern came calling.
Sitting in her bright corner office on the South Bank, the new director of Tate Modern laughs at the memory. “I actually said that out loud, and more than once,” says Hindsbo, 50, who took over from her predecessor Frances Morris in September. “And then the call came. So I needed to reconsider.”
Why Tate Modern, among all the world’s great institutions? “I think this is one of the greatest institutions there is,” she shrugs. “It's a new institution [Tate Modern opened in 2000, relatively recently for a national museum], but it's so significant. It has such a wide reach, both audience wise, but also in the art world. And for the individual, I think people have quite unique experiences here.”
It may only be one museum rather than four, but at the centre of one of the world’s truly global cities, Tate Modern is a beast. Though not yet back to its pre-pandemic peak of six million annual visitors, the last 12 months have seen almost five million people come through the doors.
“That is a lot of people. But Tate Modern always seems to renew itself,” she says. “It's a new museum and it came into being in a time of change. Since then, the world kept changing, and Tate Modern kept changing accordingly. I love that about it. And you know, some of the finest and most touching shows I ever saw, I saw here. It's quite a special place.”
She hopes to keep it that way. “We are in a world that is changing quite a lot in the past few years too, I think it's safe to say that it's more a place of uncertainty than maybe it was. So I think I'm a leader of change, but I'm also a leader that is loyal to the direction and the course that is already there. And what is really important to me, it's my mantra – and it says it on our actual building – free and open to all. Which I think is something that you should remember every day.”
Hindsbo is friendly and fun to talk to, free and open herself – most of the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who has spent the past six years in charge of a national institution, she has a politician’s aptitude for waffling through questions she doesn’t want to answer, like when I try to press her on the thorny question of museum funding.
What does she personally think about the British Museum’s recent decision to take £50m over the next 10 years from philanthropic pariah BP, to support its forthcoming major renovation? After years of protests against the oil and gas company’s involvement in culture, the choice has been controversial to say the least.
“Throughout history there’s been a lot of controversial decisions and discussions about both public and private funding,” she says, airily. “And it's no different today. I think we will always be having these discussions; suddenly the world changes and what was OK to do last year, cannot be done today.”
But it has been, I say, by the British Museum. So what do you think?
“You will always have to think about how you're funding and who you're taking the money from,” she says. “And I can [only] speak for Tate on that matter, but of course it is always a discussion. It was a discussion in my previous job as well. And the one I had before that. It all needs to balance. But I think today, you need more private support, and then you need to be more careful about who's supporting you. So that is, of course, also a bit complicated. But I think it's important to do a good due diligence.”
We move on. She lights up, on the other hand, when I ask about the role of the art museum in social and healthcare, something she has spoken out on before.
“That's actually something quite important to me, especially now,” she says. She tells me about a major research programme released in November 2019 by the World Health Organisation ”on art and culture, and its effect on both physical and mental health”.
Covering the effects on dementia to art, in hospitals, schools and as part of the educational system, the study concluded that pretty much across the board there was “a significant improvement in both mental and physical health, when exposed to arts and culture. And then four months later, Covid happened. And there were a lot of issues, of course, but I think art was such a huge part of us getting through that,” she says.
“But most of all, art actually makes a difference also among the youth,” she says. “There's so many specific, documented cases where it makes a significant improvement. And I think, coming out of Covid, there's a whole generation that is struggling. Maybe everybody is, but there's a specific generation that got sent home from school, coming into the most significant years - you couldn't live a normal life, you couldn't reach out to people.
“And for some, it might have been a blessing, just to stay at home. But it enforced that isolation as well. So we have a whole generation that is lonely, that has depression. And I think art can make a huge difference in that because it can provide a non-judgmental space. And that's an area where a cultural institution can actually participate in making a real change.”
Tate has quite a young audience here, and a surprisingly large local one, considering its international status (probably due to it being free). “I think it's about a third,” Hindsbo says, and being in London, it’s remarkably diverse. Tate has talked a good talk over the past few years regarding diversifying its collections to reflect that, something that Hindsbo is keen to keep up.
She praises her boss, Tate’s director Maria Balshaw, saying “she has started us on this course, where I think the core phrase is ‘real change’, she says. “And that is so strong, because it is quite different to have real change than just to want to change the diversity, change the audience. To have real change, it needs to be embedded in everything you do, what's within as well as what's without. It's quite another commitment.”
Tate is “working actively in what we buy, what we show, how we show it, for instance. We're doing an amazing show with Emily Kame Kngwarreye, an Australian artist. It started with an acquisition and now that's going to be a major show next year. So it's not just your tick boxes. [These artists, such as Kame Kngwarreye, who was an Aboriginal Australian] are the front runners.”
Coming out of Covid, we have a whole generation that is lonely, that has depression. Art can make a huge difference.
She credits Tate with playing a significant role in the recent shift in view on “what art can be and what art should be. The art historical canon, 20 years ago, did not look the same way as it does today,” she says. “Major shows have been done here with important female artists. When you give them a significant space one after the other, that is stating that these are big, important artists in history. If it’s not in the book, then we're going to rewrite them.”
2024 feels like an unprecedented year in terms of the number of major shows for women artists, not just at Tate, but across the UK. Hindsbo agrees, but notes there’s a long way to go. “I think, if we at some point sit down and go, OK, now we’re OK, we really including everybody, then I think we should just resign.”
We talk about Yoko Ono, whose sprawling retrospective exhibition opened at Tate Modern earlier this month. “She is not just the wife of somebody. She’s a significant artist with a practice that means so much.” She mentions Ono’s White Chess Board, a set up ready for playing on which all the pieces are white (underneath the table is a plaque reading “CHESS SET FOR PLAYING AS LONG AS YOU CAN REMEMBER WHERE ALL YOUR PIECES ARE”).
“It was made in the mid-Sixties, but I think that is amazing because it says so much about the world now, why are we doing these things? It was kind of a protest piece [against conflict] but in such a subtle and reflective manner. At some point you will lose track of your pieces, you will not be able to remember why you're doing it.”
Which made it a slightly odd thing that the opening of Ono’s show was chosen by protestors calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Hindsbo’s speech was disrupted by chanting, which went on for 20 minutes and was cheered by some in the crowd. Tate staff were reluctant to throw the protestors out, and Hindsbo simply shrugged and said, “We welcome everyone.”
“For me, and for us, freedom of speech is quite important,” she tells me. “But then again, even freedom of speech comes with some kind of restrictions [hate speech for example] I would say if you breach the fundamental principles of freedom of speech, then it is an issue that concerns everybody, and would also concern us as an institution.”
We return to the question of funding. “Of course, if I just see things from my perspective, we are a public institution with a public mandate, and we can change people's lives. So of course we should be 100 per cent public funded,” she says. “But that's just not the world we're living in, and it's not the system. Even though you would like it to, it's not how the world works.”
Hindsbo is settling nicely into her new surroundings. She has moved to West Hampstead with her husband, the Norwegian businessman and former politician Martin Smith-Sivertsen, and two sons. What thrills her most about living and working in London?
“I think it's the possibilities. It's like, suddenly it's the whole world,” she says. “So you’re in this amazing city, coming to work with the best people in the world, and what we do actually makes an impact out there. It's kind of this local, global city.”
