© TATE, JAI MONAGHAN
Museum directors sometimes find there are artworks in their collections that pull them in like magnets, that they can’t walk past without stopping. When Karin Hindsbo was the director of the National Museum in Oslo, from 2017 to 2023, that was often a display with porcelain vases—swannish necks, cobalt blue paint—from the Chinese Ming dynasty. Since Hindsbo took up her post as director of Tate Modern in September last year, it has often been Cildo Meireles’s 2001 installation Babel, a tower of whispering radios which dominates a dusky room on the fourth floor. “You can just go up there and think of the world we live in,” Hindsbo says. The installation makes her contemplate communication, noise, the media, overachieving, striving, failing.
Noise is part of the job when you run one of the world’s most influential galleries. Last year the Tate had 1,343 workers, 76,657 artworks, six million visitors, four museums (Tate Modern, Britain, Liverpool, St Ives) and £1.7bn of total assets.