Tone Olaf Nielsen
Tone Olaf Nielsen is an independent curator, educator, and co-founding member of the artist-curator collective Goll & Nielsen and the curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion. For the past ten years, Nielsen’s individual and collective curatorial practices have critically engaged notions of difference and resistance, and could be seen as a continual attempt to unpack questions of diversity and otherness, intolerance and conviviality, agency and protest in the age of global capitalism, migration, and war. To that aim, she has developed a transnational, interdisciplinary, and site-specific exhibition format, which provides a collective but agonistic space for the articulation and exchange of alternative representations of the world. Merging postcolonial, feminist, queer, activist, and radical democracy theories, Nielsen’s methodology stresses the socio-political dimension of curatorial work and its potential to promote positive social change through the transformative process of acquiring new objects of knowledge.
Nielsen holds a Cand.Phil. in Art History from the University of Copenhagen (1994) and received her MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from UCLA in 2002 with the thesis exhibition Democracy When?! Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles. She has held various fixed-term institutional positions on and off for the past eleven years, most recently as curator at NICFA, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art and lecturer in art theory and criticism at the newly established Art Academy in Tromso, Norway.