Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir

Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir is an Icelandic art historian, writer, and curator whose work engages collaborative methodologies, curatorial learning, and site-responsive exhibition-making. Her practice often unfolds across institutional and grassroots contexts, with a focus on fostering dialogue between artists, places, and publics. She is one of the founding members of the KOK curatorial collective, an initiative dedicated to expanding and critically rethinking curatorial practices in Iceland.

Her recent curatorial projects include In the Undergrowth at Ars Longa Contemporary Art Museum (2025), A Seed Grown from Stone at the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SÍM), and Unknown Benevolence, Hafnarborg Art Museum’s Autumn Exhibition (2024), which subsequently traveled to Sláturhúsið Art Center. Upcoming projects include Weaving Cosmologies – Dreymendur & draumgjafar at Skaftfell (2026), as well as international curatorial residencies at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin and B28 in Helsinki.

Þórhildur Tinna holds a BA in Art History and Theory from the University of Iceland and completed part of her studies at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She later earned an MA in Arts and Cultural Management with a focus on curating from King’s College London.

Her professional background spans key roles within the Icelandic art ecosystem, including Project Manager of the International Programme at the Icelandic Art Center, where she worked on initiatives such as the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She has also been deeply involved with LungA Art Festival and the Sequences Art Biennial, serving as its director in 2023.

She is currently Director of the Cultural Office of Fjarðabyggð, where she leads exhibitions, residencies, and public programming in the Eastfjords of Iceland.

Curating as Becoming: Learning, Collaboration, and Collective Agency

This talk examines curatorial learning as a practice of becoming — an evolving mode of engagement that extends beyond organising exhibitions to encompass emotional, intellectual, and relational forms of knowledge production. Drawing on my experience with projects developed in Iceland and internationally, including the exhibition Unknown Benevolence, I propose that curating functions not only as a methodological practice, delivering an exhibition, but also as an experimental space for collective imagination and empowerment.

A central reference in this work is KOK curatorial collective, a collaborative platform I co‑founded to drive the curatorial forward in Iceland. KOK approaches curating through trust, collaboration, and open communication, creating shared structures that enable artists, curators, and communities to co‑shape the art ecology in Iceland. By foregrounding connection and mutual support rather than competition or gatekeeping, KOK exemplifies how collective practices can expand the possibilities of curatorial work.

In reflecting on Unknown Benevolence and other projects across museums, artist‑run spaces, residencies, and municipal cultural programs, I argue that curatorial learning is deeply relational and situated. It requires attentive listening, flexibility, and the capacity to hold processes that are not fully knowable in advance. By embracing negotiation, care, and experimentation, curating becomes a vehicle for collective empowerment, enabling participants to collaboratively shape outcomes and recognize their agency within creative ecosystems.

Ultimately, this talk foregrounds curating as a space where knowledge and agency are generated collectively, fostering resilience, insight, and imaginative futures, while positioning KOK as an example of how collaborative curatorial structures can actively support these processes.