THE APPEAL OF PUBLIC SPACE

The renovation of existing spaces and new extensions characterize the current state of art institutions in the region of Finland's capital. The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art is under reconstruction for the next six months and will open its doors with the exhibition "Robert Mapplethorpe" in March 2015. The Helsinki City Art Museum is closed due to the building of a new extension of its spaces at Tennis Palace and will reopen next fall. One of the floors of the Ateneum Art Museum is also being renovated. Dreams and existing plans for new museums are also currently affecting art life. Last year, the Amos Anderson Art Museum, funded by a private foundation, surprised everyone by revealing plans for a new museum space in the very center of town. It will be located inside and underneath the beautiful building referred to as the Glass Palace, designed by Viljo Revell in the thirties, which houses, among other things, the largest cinema in Helsinki, the Bio Rex. The news was released strategically in the middle of the heated debate over the Guggenheim Helsinki, a proposal by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation that was ultimately rejected by the city government in spring 2012. The story has not yet been told, but in the meantime, a new museum space was built and opened last summer in Mänttä (250 kilometers from Helsinki)--also entirely with private funding--when the Serlachius Museums opened their new extension dedicated to contemporary art.

Despite local resistance, the Guggenheim Helsinki has proceeded to the phase where The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation raised private funds to sponsor an open architectural competition for the new museum building in Helsinki. They received a total of 1,715 proposals from 77 countries, out of which six finalists will be selected and announced in early December. The competition has been criticized because there is very little guarantee of local funding being available for the actual construction of the museum. But Helsinki City has reserved a prominent waterfront site for the competition of the proposed museum in the South-Harbour area.

Public space seems to have a strong appeal, not only when it comes to institutions but also when it comes to more ephemeral artistic endeavors. When the IHME Contemporary Art Festival initiated the annual production of large-scale public art projects in 2008, interest in public space was rather modest in Finland. There had been projects by art institutions, several artist-run festivals, and events that occasionally took place in the public realm. But gradually it has become more programmatic to commission and organize participatory urban projects in the city. The Helsinki Festival strung along with the IHME made a large contribution to the development in this direction in collaboration with smaller festivals integrated into its programs and marketing schemes. Last year, the Helsinki Festival added another art agent to its hub, the city-funded Checkpoint Helsinki, which was born out of the resistance among artists and art professionals to the plans to establish a Guggenheim Helsinki museum in the city. Initially, the focus of Checkpoint Helsinki was to commission and produce works of art by emerging international artists and include them in local museum collections.

The Helsinki Festival is a festival for all the arts, whereby emphasis is placed on the music and theater program. However, in recent years more interest has been given to, and more resources made available for, visual art projects. This year the festival collaborated with four art museums: the Helsinki City Art Museum, the Espoo Modern Art Museum, the Museum of Photography, and the Amos Anderson Art Museum. It joined forces with the Helsinki City Museum, inviting Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi to produce the extraordinary "Hotel Manta of Helsinki," in which visitors can spend the night with one of the most popular sculptures in public space. Along with the Amos Anderson Art Museum the festival commissioned a public sculpture by Finnish artist Tommi Toija, accompanied by a show held at the museum that received a great deal of attention. Over the past six years, the IHME Project has taken place in numerous venues in Helsinki--from parks, libraries, and the train station to Market Square and various city districts and suburbs--to be discovered by the local population. For the first time, this year's commission was made available globally on the Internet--thanks to a collaboration with the National Broadcasting Company of Finland, the film "True Finn" by Israeli artist Yael Bartana can be viewed on YLE Areena's on-demand-service for the remainder of 2014.

The public sector's role in funding art and cultural institutions has always been important in Finland. As part of a northern European tradition, it is considered the responsibility of the state to support the arts and culture and make them accessible to everyone. The state and local governments have had a clear division of tasks, and they have shared their resources for the support of numerous national art institutions. Their existence has been secured by legislation that guarantees immunity from political change and continuity. Today, however, both state and local governments are under pressure to cut their budgets, not only in the cultural sector but also in the areas of education and the social services. Thus, as has been shown in the examples above, the role of private foundations in securing cultural services is becoming increasingly important. The same applies to the role of cultural centers, events, and festivals, as the funding policy has been updated: it has become more flexible to fund projects than to maintain institutions. People working in the cultural sector are justifiably looking to the next parliamentary elections and concerned about how severe the cutbacks will be in the fields of arts and culture.

Despite the challenging political and economic times, cultural life outside of Helsinki's institutions is vibrant, and more and more activities are being realized in collaboration with others on a non-profit basis. Collective for-free projects such as Restaurant Day and Cleaning Day continue to be popular, bringing people together and allowing them to be creative in different ways and in different areas of life.