Directing Tate Modern has to be my dream job

Karin Hindsbo tells Nancy Durrant about wooing Yoko Ono for her major new exhibition and why it’s time to rewrite the history books with more female artists

- Nancy Durrant

AS SHE neared the end of her six-year contract as director of the National Museum of Art, Architecure and Design in Oslo, Karin Hindsbo was in a 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 new mega-museum with a staggering budget of £400 million. 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 Francis 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, 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 past 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."