Glimpses of the Paja Workshop

People process matters in different ways: some want to discuss what they have just seen, while others want to comment on it with images. Kiasma’s Paja Workshop offers various options to process the exhibition and leave your own imprint on the exhibition or workshop space.

The Paja on the Fifth Floor organises workshops for kindergartens, school classes and mixed groups of children and adults. They are always closely related to the current exhibition. Participants can process the thoughts evoked by the exhibitions through hands-on artistic work. In some workshops, children decide the tasks and supervise them. Last spring visitors could borrow special ARS sensory bags containing background information, stimuli and short exercises about some of the ARS works.

Such hands-on tasks encourage people to work together, express their ideas and share them with others, which deepens our relationship to art and artworks and inspires us to interpret them for ourselves.

Workshops for school children

During ARS 06, children from the second, fourth and sixth grades of comprehensive school participated in the Four Times in Kiasma workshops. The first time included a guided tour to the exhibition. The other three times consisted of work on the various themes of the exhibition. One of the workshops was about remembering. Children discussed consideration for other people and giving presents. Their task was to design a gift soap for a person of their choice and fill it with a surprise.

Children as designers

Besides participating in workshops, children also planned them. Five workshops by children were organised at the Upside Down family event. First they studied pictures of the ARS works in November. Then they visited Kiasma to see the exhibition being constructed and finally the actual exhibition. The children also chose the artwork they were interested in and planned the task related to it.

Artist’s work is a video about men lugging rickshaws behind them at the bottom of the sea. The children described it as dreamlike, lonely and a little sad, but exciting because of the fine music. In the workshop, they wanted to build a miniature world of wire, reed and modelling clay in an aquarium filled with water. Both children and adults participated in the workshop.

Sensory bag

Designed for families with children and special groups, ARS Bag for Senses was available for the first time in ARS 06. Visitors could take the bag, the size of a small suitcase, along to the exhibition. The sensory bag was packed with background information, stimuli and short exercises about five works in the exhibition. It also contained materials used for the works, and the visitor could touch them. The sensory bag was also suitable for the visually impaired, as some of the texts were in Braille.

Kalle Hamm