She arrives from MUNCH in Oslo, where she spent three years expanding the institution from a single-artist museum into one covering modernism and contemporary art. @ Munch Museum

This week, Tone Hansen takes over as director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hansen arrives from MUNCH (a.k.a. the Munch Museum) in Oslo, where she has been director since 2022, and before that spent 11 years leading the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. She succeeds Gitte Ørskou, and inherits an enlarged Moderna Museet, with the organization having absorbed ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, along with the Public Art Agency Sweden at the beginning of this year. We caught up with Hansen to hear about meeting Yayoi Kusama in her Tokyo studio, how to use a collection of 100,000 photographs and the tourists who mistake contemporary art for Munch.

Congratulations on your new job! Not to jump to the end of it already, but your tenure is projected to end August 31, 2032. What are your short term goals for the institution? What are some that you’d like to have finished by 2032?

To position Moderna Museet so that we attract audiences from all over the world, but also act as a driving force locally for the big artistic questions, and internationally as a place you must visit if you want to keep up with what is happening in the art world. The expanded mandate that includes art in public space, architecture and design, as well as visual arts, provides great opportunities to discuss the place of aesthetics in our everyday lives and in urban and regional development, and the premises of Moderna Museet are created for large exhibitions and performances. By ’32 we should have established a network of research with major institutions, and the collection is as relevant as ever before.

You trained as an artist at the academies in Oslo and Malmö. What advantage does that background grant you when you’re planning exhibitions?

My education as an artist and curator gives me the advantage of knowledge of practical work and the costs of standing alone as an artist. This perhaps gives me the ability to have greater empathy for both artists and audiences, but I am also very aware of the areas of expertise I depend on others to cover. Respect for the knowledge of others is key for me.

At Henie Onstad, where you were a curator and then director before MUNCH, you collaborated with Moderna Museet on Hilma af Klint, Yayoi Kusama and Marina Abramović, all of whom have become household names since then. What was it like working with them before their recent explosion in popularity? To what do you attribute their rabid fanbase?

I was lucky enough to meet Kusama in her studio in Tokyo in 2015 and met a committed and hard-working artist who got involved in all projects even though her fame had already elevated by then, and I am proud to have been the one who introduced her to a larger audience in Norway. Marina Abramović has a large team around her who ensures the precision needed to successfully recreate her legendary performances, and it was both demanding and educational to set up her Abramović Institute, where you had to put down watches and phones before entering through a cleansing ritual. Suspending time, and being in a room and performing meaningless tasks such as sorting grains of rice, is also a way of building concentration, an exercise we all benefit from going through now and then. I would have loved to sit at the table at one of Hilma af Klint’s collective seances, and her exploration of the spiritual also resonates in artists such as Edvard Munch. When we showed her at Henie Onstad, many were skeptical and didn’t want to consider it art, but the audience loved it regardless of the criticism. I think we attributed some knowledge to a broader audience in Norway and, more than that, helped place Oslo as a destination for culture.

What have been some of your favorite exhibitions at Moderna Museet? Which ones do you think will inform your tenure?

I was going through my books here in Oslo and came across a very special exhibition catalog from 2019, “Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology,” an exhibition by Lars Bang Larsen taking Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic installation Mud Muse from ’69 to ’71 as a starting point for a group exhibition, stating: artistic intelligence before artificial intelligence.

The photography holdings at Moderna Museet encompass roughly 100,000 items. In my columns I’m always banging on about how photos are the dominant medium in our post-literate society. What excites you about such a large and distinguished photography collection?

Photography opens up a larger discussion in our time about truth, A.I. and the role of the artist. Since photography can be created entirely digitally it is also a question of who is making the artwork. Photo also affects us in our everyday lives as our communication has become increasingly image-driven. Photography as art and documentation can train our critical sense, our empathy towards what we do not yet understand. Questions to be continuously asked and developed with contemporary artists.

You have said MUNCH became a museum for Edvard Munch, modernism and contemporary art rather than a single-artist museum. How did you help that institution expand its focus, and what lessons did that process teach you?

It was evident that MUNCH needed a strategy that defined the areas within which the museum should operate, given its scale and location. A three-part program strategy for art, music and performance and a program statement provided direction, along with an international strategy to position the museum in our larger community. Edvard Munch was a champion of artistic freedom, experimentation and individual liberation in his time. One of my first initiatives at the museum was establishing the MUNCH Award to continue this legacy. With this award, we pay tribute to the artist’s role as a critical voice in society. The first two recipients are Rosana Paulino and Samia Halaby. The next recipient will be announced shortly.

I have championed several major solo exhibitions during my time as director. The one in the making is Katharina Grosse, “Black Bed.” Through our close collaboration, we also see the value of spending time together in the process of creating new works.

We have learned that many artists get energy from being in an indirect context with Munch, and working at his studio at Ekely has been a great asset for many artists. Another important focus has been to take a position in an indigenous perspective with a curator as the first in Norway. This affects both how we think about exhibitions and creates new research within our artistic fields.

A 2024 interview asked you to “settle once and for all” the question of whether the figure in The Scream is hearing a scream or screaming himself. You demurred by saying that you preferred the mystery, and reminded us that the figure might well be a woman. What are some other silly questions that people have asked you about this artwork over the years?

According to Munch, it is nature screaming back at you. It is an emotion rather than a figure. I have had to guide tourists every now and then in our contemporary shows mistaking it for being by Edvard Munch.

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