Stina Högkvist

Stina Högkvist (1972) is a Swedish curator, writer and an art historian. Together with Norwegian curator Marianne Zamecznik, she founded the Simon Says curatorial platform in Stockholm, Sweden, and ran it between 2001 and 2003.

She has been working at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway, since 2006, where she was Director of Collections and Exhibitions from 2018-2025. She was also part of the managerial team that planned the new National Museum that opened in Oslo in 2022. Högkvist is now the Director of the Northern Norwegian Art museum, with loacations in Tromsø, Bodø and Longyearbyen. Högkvist has worked extensively as a curator and writer.

In 2009, she co-curated Hypocrisy: The Site Specificity of Morality with Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh at the Norwegian Museum of Contemporary Art. The same year, she co-curated the 5th MOMENTUM biennale in Moss, Norway, with Slovenian curator Lina Džuverović.

She curated several projects with Norwegian curator Geir Haraldseth, including the exhibition Luringen at the KUIR festival in Bogota, Colombia in 2017.

The Power of the So-Called Periphery: How Small Institutions Shape Bigger Futures

In a world increasingly shaped by centralisation, scale, and corporate models of management, the importance of small institutions has never been greater. Local newspapers, regional museums, and community-based organisations do more than fill gaps left by larger systems. They preserve distinct voices, strengthen democratic participation, and offer alternative ways of working, leading, and imagining the future.

Drawing on experiences from the Arctic, this presentation explores how places often described as peripheral can become sites of innovation, influence, and meaningful change. Smaller institutions may have fewer resources, but they often possess something equally valuable: agility, proximity, and purpose. They can move quickly from idea to action, build relationships based on trust rather than hierarchy, and create impact through deep connections to the communities they serve.

From the North, the world looks different. Distance from traditional centres of power can create a clarity of perspective. It encourages us to value local knowledge, lived experience, multiple voices, and long-term relationships. It reminds us that significance is not always measured by size, visibility, or growth, but by relevance, participation, and the ability to create belonging.

At a time when many organisations are becoming increasingly standardised, there is also a need to protect other institutional cultures: cultures rooted in care, curiosity, collaboration, and public responsibility. The survival of local newspapers and small cultural institutions is therefore about more than preserving organisations. It is about safeguarding spaces where different stories can be told, where experimentation is possible, and where people can come together around shared questions and concerns.

What we often call the periphery is not the edge of the conversation. It is a place from which new perspectives emerge, where strong communities are built, and where some of the most important ideas about our collective future are already taking shape.

Think Small

This workshop explores the transition from working within large museums and cultural institutions to smaller, decentralized organizations.

Drawing on personal experience, it considers how scale shapes not only decision-making and public engagement, but also the pace at which institutions operate. Size and speed are deeply entangled: smaller organizations often work with fewer resources and greater uncertainty, yet their proximity to communities can allow for more responsive, collaborative, and adaptive forms of practice.

Rather than viewing these conditions as limitations, the workshop asks how they can become a strength—creating space to actively shape institutional identity, experiment with alternative structures, and remain attentive to the urgencies and possibilities of the present.