That’s how they are doing it in Finland (an interview with Leevi Haapala)

Kiasma‘s director since June 2015, Leevi Haapala knows the vibrant Finnish contemporary art scene and its near future like few others. Curator, art writer and lecturer, he achieved his current position after six years spent as a researcher at the Central Art Archives in the Finnish National Gallery, and seven more years as a curator of Kiasma’s permanent collection. Haapala will turn 44 this year. Since 2009 he is a board member in Pro Arte Foundation and IHME Contemporary Art Festival in Helsinki, and he is also a member of the selection board of the Young Artist of the Year at Tampere Art Museum. Last year he was a chairperson of the AVEK prize (The Promotion Center for Audiovisual Culture Finland), and a chair for ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Live Art Prize. We met him last summer in Helsinki, and he kindly agreed to share with us his unique knowledge of this fascinating region of A(r)tlantis.

Would you give us a panorama of the current Finnish art scene?

The Finnish art scene is in a very vibrant mood seen from an institutional perspective, particularly in Helsinki. After the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma reopened in Spring 2015, we have had our best attendance in ten years – 235,000 visitors – and until August this year we have had in Kiasma and Ateneum – our sister museum at Finnish National Gallery – together more than a half a million visitors. For your comparison, Helsinki has the same amount of inhabitants! Of course, tourists from Russia, UK, Germany, Japan, China and South Korea, as well as visitors from the Nordic and Baltic countries, have found us as well.

Museum boom is a topic in Finland as part of a discussion about leisure time, formation of global cultural industry, and also as a key element in cultural tourism. There is a growing interest in contemporary art, design and visual arts in general. We have dedicated individuals in different art institutions to curate content and create networks, which enables us to offer a relatively small but very active, unique and international art scene.

Within walking distance from us are the Helsinki Art Museum, the Kunsthalle Helsinki, Amos Anderson – with new Amos Rex opening in Spring 2018 – and about ten minutes drive, the EMMA Museum of Modern Art in Espoo. We create together, in the heart of the city, a circle of active exhibition venues run by local governments, private and public foundations subsidised by the Ministry of Education and Culture. We all partner with international institutions to produce and co-produce exhibitions.

The three other key players in the field of contemporary art are FRAME Visual Art Finland, Helsinki International Artists Programme (HIAP) and the IHME Contemporary Art Festival. IHME commissions renowned international artists to produce pieces on public spaces in an annual basis. FRAME’s mission is to increase awareness and visibility of the Finnish visual arts and, in addition to their grants programme, they are actively involved in various international projects, like the programme of the Finnish Aalto Pavilion and the Nordic Pavilion during Venice Biennale. HIAP is an international residency programme for artists and curators, which brings nearly 200 artists and art professionals to work in Helsinki each year through open calls, collaborative ventures and thematic projects.

Helsinki is also an exciting festival city, especially in August with FLOW Festival bringing music, from old school legends to topical newcomers. FLOW warmly embraces the arts, as well as an exceptional array of world cuisine. Helsinki Festival is the largest arts festival in Finland, organised also during late summer and working actively on the fields of dance, theatre, circus, classical music, visual arts and cinema. Helsinki International Film Festival, Love and Anarchy, takes place in September.

The gallery scene is getting increasingly specialised, with many artists-union galleries, foundation-based initiatives, artist-run spaces and some four to five commercial galleries attending international art fairs. These are Galerie Anhava, Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki Contemporary, Galleria Heino and Gallery Taik Persons. We have all together some forty art galleries in the Helsinki region.

Outside the capital area, the Gösta Serlachius Museum in Central Finland opened an extension dedicated to contemporary art in 2014. During a Summer trip there, it is also worth visiting the Mänttä Art Festival in the same town, one example of the great tradition of Summer shows in the countryside. Also the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, as well as the Pori Art Museum and the Turku Art Museum on the West Coast, are dedicated to modern and contemporary art on both national and international levels. ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is an international contemporary arts festival presenting site-specific works in Kuopio, a small Finnish city which is surrounded by lakes and forests.

Finland has a high level of art education at the Aalto University and the University of the Arts Helsinki, both of them having also small curatorial programmes on MA level, with some 20–30% exchange students (out of all the alumni) annually. The grants systems by different foundations have established a firm basis both for making art and doing research in the field. Finnish artists and curators participate in exhibitions and residency programmes around the world. Curators working as freelancers and also in art institutions have better networks than ever before.

Furthermore, there is a new but relatively small generation of art collectors for whom contemporary art is a way of life. Collector Timo Miettinen has established Salon Dahlmann in Berlin, which presents an eclectic programme ranging different formats: exhibitions, concerts, performances and workshops promoting Finnish, German and international art. Zabludowicz Collection has initiated an international residency programme for invited artists on the island of Sarvisalo in Loviisa, Finland, which offers an open-ended and discursive environment for the production of art.

What would you change in this scene?

I believe we could make it more active, art professionals could gather and think how to make it more attractive, plan international initiatives in a more efficient and appealing way. More mutual collaboration, discussions, projects and initiatives with FRAME, museums, galleries and curators alike. Be it participating in a major art fair, a biennial or collaborating with key international museums, marketing and promoting, even creating a festival together.

A very good example of this was when Finland was selected as a focus country at ARCOmadrid in 2014. I curated a selection of galleries and, beyond excellent visibility at the art fair, FRAME, Kiasma and thirteen galleries worked together with Ifema (the organisers of ARCO). We also had a very strong presence at art institutions in Madrid and a good amount of publicity in the Spanish and Portuguese-language press, as well as in international art publications.

Also it would be helpful to have statistics from different institutions with same standards, to know what is done regularly already, and to draw conclusions on what is missing. At the moment, the Finnish atmosphere of discussion is somehow polarised, which is reflected also in the arts. We are creative, well organised and proud of what we are, and what we have achieved so far, but sometimes hesitating too long… Also I would like to welcome international curators for short or long-term collaborations, to open up discussions with museums, art schools and galleries. It is about mutual exchange and learning processes: ideas, concepts, ways of working, making exhibitions…

Who are the up and coming Finnish artists that we should keep an eye on? Or perhaps artists that are not so young, but deserve more recognition outside of Finland.

Millennials are now emerging with force, shaping a really talented and educated next generation. Artists like Anna Estarriola, Nabb&Teeri, Reija Meriläinen, Artor Jesus Inkerö, Jenni Luhta, and Alma Heikkilä. Also, artists who have had a very promising start with their careers, but should definitely have more recognition outside Finland, are Adel Abidin, Otto Karvonen, Mikko Kuorinki, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Jani Leinonen, Liisa Lounila, Jani Ruscica, Riiko Sakkinen and Perttu Saksa – just to mention a few.

What are the highlights of the upcoming art season in Finland?

This Fall, Helsinki will showcase strong female artists. We open in October a retrospective by Mona Hatoum, which is a collaboration with Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern. The show will be thought-provoking and elegant at the same time. Also this Fall, we’ll exhibit a new series of works by a young photo-journalist called Meeri Koutaniemi. The characters are female survivors of honour violence in several countries, villagers who oppose circumcision, or others who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for survival. There is a link between these two exhibitions of artists from different generations and backgrounds.

Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) will show a retrospective by Yayoi Kusama, and Niki de Saint Phalle is currently on view at the Kunsthalle Helsinki.

Next year, we are celebrating Finland’s Centennial, and Kiasma will proudly present ARS17. Hello World!, an exhibition which definitely looks to the future! The subject of the show is the global digital revolution whose impacts are evident in culture and economy, as well as in human identity and behaviour. Opening at the end of March 2017, this exhibition will showcase twenty-five artists, from Hito Steyerl to the Millennials, and will include an important live art programme in the Kiasma Theatre. Furthermore, it will offer a fresh approach to contemporary art by also expanding the viewing experience into the online realm with ARS17+ Online Art, which will present new commissions by fifteen artists,.

How do you build your programme at Kiasma? For instance, how do you balance the proportion between emerging and established artists, group and solo shows, international and local artists, etc?

We start our programming in Kiasma some two years ahead. Every season, Spring and Fall are based on a broader theme linking contents together. For a museum guest, a visit to Kiasma is an experience which may start already on our website and activities on social media. We have a very specific visitor profile: over half of our public is under 35 years old, and also 40% of them are visiting for the first time. We have profiled seven different visitor types or segments of our audience for whom we plan our exhibitions, events, talks and performances, and also to whom we focus our marketing campaigns.

On the following years, I’d like to focus on broader themes in our programme. These are topics like artists as protagonists in forecasting the future; digital turn, open data and new communities; global encounters between cultures and religions; multidisciplinarity in arts; affectivity and anxiety within building identities.

We gather monthly with our curators and producers – in a meeting called Curatorium – to discuss our upcoming programme. Last Spring and Summer, our broader theme aimed to investigate different emotions, senses and materialities. We did that by showcasing two different cultural traditions: Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto presented a solo show called Boa, consisting of a site-specific knitted tent installation, while Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s Happy Happy exhibition took the viewer into a colourful plastic jungle. We show annually two to three comprehensive solo exhibitions by Finnish or international artists, or a research-based group exhibition. Two floors in Kiasma are dedicated to our collections and we plan annually a new theme-based collection display including also new acquisitions. We acquire around a hundred pieces per year, among purchases, donations and commissions. The collection display is a co-curated selection of between seventy and a hundred works. Our collection spans from the 1970s until today, and it currently contains approximately 8,000 works of art which are part of the Finnish National Gallery collection.

In our curated group shows and collection displays, we always showcase Finnish and international art side by side, creating links and discourses around various topics. Besides that, we have two to three smaller changing exhibitions or new commissions by either a Finnish or international emerging artist, or an avant-garde figure who gives a new perspective to the other exhibitions on show at a given time.

Kiasma Theatre has a strong profile as a producer and collaborator, often partnering with independent theatres, artist groups and festivals. Its programme contains live art, interdisciplinary theatre, performances, talks, screenings and, every Summer, the URB urban festival, which expands to street level, bars, suburbs and to other cultural institutions and artist-run spaces.

In your point of view, what are the main challenges museums are faced with today? Taking your personal experience as a reference point.

Museums should recognise their unique role as mediators in today’s cultural discussions. We can offer different points of view with our programmes and exhibitions through an ongoing cultural agenda. Of course, museums need first to know their audiences, to whom and with whom they are making their programme. And to select the right medium to communicate with different target groups. Contemporary art museums should tell relevant and memorable stories about our time; stories which are based on art and culture, ideas and interpretations. All other effects and monetary efforts to fundraise and promote museums, for instance as tourist attractions, will then follow. It’s all about content and how to mediate it.

November 12, 2016