Your Place and Mine
Art has something to offer to everybody. It is an essential part of being human. Art helps us to explore and understand the world, society, ourselves and other people. Art can increase wellbeing, harmony and life management, but also act as a channel for criticism and dissent, absent from other fields of society.
Art and museum professionals wish to facilitate access to this world of art and encourage people to enter it. This does not mean forcing people into museums, but rather, providing equal opportunities. The idea of accessible museums is being expanded by the perspective of cultural differences, or, rather, diversity. One of the key questions is how to understand visual culture which has not been born within a conception of art familiar to us.
Kiasma has promoted this diversity and cultural accessibility with various projects since its opening. The aim of the projects Learning in Museums and Farshaxan was to explore how a museum can act as a tool of integration between cultures. In the Farshaxan project, 6-year-old immigrant Somali children got to know art by Olli Lyytikäinen. Art, not to mention an art exhibition, was not a previously familiar concept to the children. Indeed, the project aimed at creating a bridge between the strong narrative tradition of the Somalis and Western visual representation. Language workshops organised at Kiasma Workshop have also attracted participants from various ethnic groups. In the workshops, people encountered art through doing things themselves in their own language.
The subURB art education projects linked with Kiasma Theatre’s URB Festival have also contributed to bridging different traditions. The site chosen for realising the project, multicultural eastern Helsinki, directed the planning of the content. The Be Your Enemy workshop brought together young people with different ethnic backgrounds to discuss their idols and enemies and ended up with the participants photographing their self portraits. In a workshop focusing on the VJ culture, young people combined stories related to their backgrounds with their observations on the city.
Kiasma is a pioneer of multicultural projects. Now Finnish National Gallery has taken the next step forward and established a position for a Cultural Diversity Coordinator. Umayya Abu-Hanna, herself an immigrant and long-time resident of Finland, was chosen for the position. A project led by the Cultural Diversity Coordinator discusses what a minority is and what culture is. How are they defined, and, most of all, who defines them and why.
Kaija Kaitavuori
Head of Development, Finnish National Gallery
Cultural Diversity Coordinator Umayya Abu-Hanna voices her thoughts on the ARS 06 exhibition on Wednesday, 3 May at 6 pm, under the heading “Your place and mine”. Free admission with the museum ticket.
