Axel Wieder is a curator and writer and since 2018 director of Bergen Kunsthall.
He has been director of Index – the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm (2014–2018), where he organized solo exhibitions with Simone Forti, Stephen Willats, Sidesel Meineche Hansen, Willem de Rooij and Anna Boghiguian and a collaborative project by John Skoog and Emanuel Röhss.
As Head of Programme at Arnolfini in Bristol (2012–2014), he organized, amongst others, “The Promise”, involving works of artists and offsite projects alongside urban planning and architectural models of Bristol, and solo exhibitions with Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Susanne Kriemann and Ian Hamilton Finlay. From 2007 to 2010, Wieder was artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and in 2010 he worked as Visiting Curator at Ludlow 38, Goethe-Institut New York. Large-scale thematic presentations have included the exhibition Social Diagrams. Planning Reconsidered (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2007), which addressed the links between planning theory and the practice of artists working today. Autobiography (Index, 2016) examined the use of quasi-personal narratives as reflective media. In 2012 Wieder organized an exhibition about the work of Maryanne Amacher at daad and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, which travelled to Bonner Kunstverein in 2014.
Wieder studied art history and cultural theory at the University of Cologne and the Humboldt University in Berlin, specializing in conceptual art, the history of exhibitions and modern architecture. Together with Jesko Fezer and Katja Reichard, he founded Pro qm in Berlin 1999, a bookstore and a venue for experimental events in the field of art and urbanism. For the 3rd Berlin Biennale in 2004 Wieder and Fezer devised a section on urban spatial development in Berlin. He has also held lecturing posts at various universities and art academies, including the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, lectured internationally, and published numerous books and contributions to catalogues, anthologies and magazines, such as Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Mousse, and Spike.