Understanding the unfamiliar
It is said that our world is becoming increasingly global. Money flows around the globe irrespective of state borders. People move either voluntarily or under compulsion. And even if you never did move anywhere, it is highly unlikely in today's world that you would live your life only amidst your own kind. Interaction between people coming from different countries and cultures, and speaking different languages, will become more commonplace. Co-existence requires understanding the new and unfamiliar. Many cultural researchers claim that we are in the middle of a continuous process of translation from one language to another.
In the arts, globalisation has a special meaning. The concepts of art and the museum institution, born and bred in the Western world, expand throughout the world, assimilate issues formerly considered non-western into themselves, and as a result, they also transform. In this sense, translating, borrowing and applying language, concepts and practices is also taking place visually.
Questions like How to make Western contemporary art more familiar to people, whose scope of experiences has never touched on it in any manner? or reversed, How to apprehend visual culture which comes from outside our own concept of art? have been pondered from the moment art audiences began to expand and after non-western art from different continents first became exhibited in art galleries side by side with Western art.
Understanding the unfamiliar is possible through the familiar. One must already know something in order to know something new. What we already know directs our observations and understanding of the new and influences our comprehension. And by the same token, when we learn a new thing it influences our former knowledge. This hermeneutic circle is actually paradoxical. Pre-knowledge, or prejudices, make us see things which fit in our former framework and hamper new learning. But then again, pre-knowledge is elementary as a basis for understanding new things.
Individuals vs. cultures?
In Finland, the aim of immigrant education is to raise children as members of two cultures; in this endeavour, the culture of origin plays an important role. Children learn to live with two languages and cultures simultaneously or side by side: they learn to translate.
Kiasma's Farshaxan project explored the ways in which Finnish and Somali treat pictures and included studies in the Islamic culture and art in the form of lectures. The project was a co-operation with school classes consisting of Somali children. During the project, we learnt to translate and understand.
On a practical level, the project meant meeting with people as individuals. We realised through our experiences how preconceptions are most often based on superficial generalisations. When we interacted with 'real' people, they constantly made cracks on these concepts. The use of the word 'culture' may result in misapprehension that a given group would act on the basis of a culture that is homogenous and never questioned. Maybe we tend to use the word ‘culture’ from this collective perspective when we encounter issues which seem distant and about which we know little.
Nevertheless, there is something beyond the individual, something that makes one behave in a certain way. I use the word 'culture' here to denote the worldview beyond art - values, traditions, custom and practices that help us structure everyday life and nurture our relationship with other people. The attitudes of Somali parents towards school and Finnish society as a whole, as well as our project, are coloured by an array of value judgements and concepts about the good and permissible or the bad and prohibited, let alone what they expect from art or a museum. It also seems that the Somalis living in Finland cling much more forcefully to their religion and customs than to their former home country – an indication perhaps, of unbalanced power and the uncertain position of Somalis among the majority culture.
Tensions
The aim of growing up in two cultures is possible as long as these cultures do not clash. But what if this happens at some point, as it probably will? Which one gives way? In the course of our lectures, we tackled two issues, which are very different in the Western and Islamic ideologies. The first was the essential content of our project, art and images, and the other was nakedness. Unfortunately, both were issues which could not be entirely avoided on museum visits to Kiasma.
The prohibition of nakedness proved more problematic. During our museum visits, the fact that there was practically no space in Kiasma without at least a small piece of uncovered human body visible was problematic. Our different attitudes surfaced as I realised that I had not even noticed the whole thing until I started to prepare the group visit and watched the works "with that certain look" – I was taken aback. The occasional bum here and breast there had never attracted my attention – and I am not even talking about the works in which nakedness is very prominent, or which contain downright pornographic elements, but the completely 'decent' works. We heard other teachers' grim experiences on the matter and the hysteria caught on: we tried to rush the groups past questionable works and were embarrassed when the children spotted precisely the works they were not supposed to and started to giggle. Of course, this is to be expected of any group consisting of 6-year-olds, but this time some of the children were very embarrassed and tried to hush their friends. With Finnish children we can always ask "What's so funny?" but in a group of Somali children we were not allowed to deal with the matter and somehow had to pretend that nothing ever happened. What we feared was the judgement of the adults, not the children.
Moreover, there are prohibitions related to concepts of 'art' and 'image'. They were, however, more 'negotiable' than nakedness: despite the essential negative attitude of Islam towards the use of images, children even drew pictures of people on their own initiative and the Somali assistants did not try to check this in any way. When the matter was discussed in the lecture, the Somali representative suggested that maybe it was not necessary to depict human beings in the visual arts classes of Somali children. But even this attitude was tolerant; he emphasised that many things are acceptable as long as there is a justified reason for it. For example, having one's passport photograph taken is acceptable as it is 'necessary' because of the arrangements of society. Could 'art' then be an adequate alibi to accept images, even nakedness? We have to remember, however, that the concept of 'art' signifies quite different things in Somali culture than it does in Kiasma but then again, this is nothing exceptional: not every Finn call it art, what they see in Kiasma. In the end, contemporary art is a lot more than mere pictoriality.
The museum’s mission
Societal changes, such as the integration of different groups of people into the society, bring new requirements for the museum. Projects like Farshaxan are part of the idea of an open and empowering museum which means that as many as possible of the groups and people in the surrounding society would become a part of the museum audience. Special services offered to different cultural groups form part of the notion of accessibility, which serves as a channel to engage new groups of people in museum activities. This is particularly true when we talk about people who are not, owing to cultural, social, linguistic or other reasons, self-evidently and 'innately' museum visitors. As regards immigrants, their life situation, perhaps also worldview and relationship with the society and the majority culture, is different from that of the 'ordinary' museum visitors. And conversely, the 'expected' audience of the art galleries are also different from those who come from Somali culture.
Art and its venue, a museum, can serve as a 'third space'. It can serve as a forum for different visual and cultural traditions to encounter each other, as well as for communication. This is what happens also in many artists' works. It still does not always mean harmony and a happy co-existence. The museum must also consider who is the one back down when concepts and values clash? How much can we invest in establishing contacts and should we hide images containing naked body parts? Or should others learn to tolerate them and should newcomers transform into consumers of culture on their own initiative? The boundaries of the encounters are constantly being negotiated, but the status of groups participating in these negotiations can be very different: minorities such as the Somalis are on the defensive. The majority culture lays down the conditions and is inclined to think that the newcomers must either adapt or stay quiet. Too stern attitudes may ruin the contact altogether and, in the case of the museum, may result in losing a potential audience.
Kaija Kaitavuori
