Leevi Haapala, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

 

May 26, 2017

 

It would be a challenge for museums to manage their daily activities without skilful interns from various study programmes linked to museum studies. Each year, several students who are training at master’s level in art history, aesthetics, museology and cultural management and production come to work with us from between one and three months. They work together with museum professionals on an exhibition or research project, they help to catalogue works of art and documents for databases, update artists’ files, edit exhibition texts, just to mention some of the key tasks.

I still remember one particular trainee from 10 years ago. Kiasma’s partner at that time, Deloitte, came up with a proposal to have an artist in residence in their office building in Ruoholahti, Helsinki. The aim of the project was to re-examine the development of co-operation between the company and the museum together with an artist. The idea was to develop a new kind of project model in which three different agents could meet and learn something together. The young artist Pilvi Takala had just completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, and I thought she was the right person to start with a discussion about this highly unconventional trainee programme.

Her art works open up the codes of behaviour operating in different social situations, so she needed a cover story to stay in the office building without revealing her background as an artist or her research topic, namely the company as a work place and its social habits among the personnel seen from the perspective of a trainee. For Takala the internship was a one-month intervention, in which an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee started to apply peculiar working methods during the last week of the internship. For example, she stayed for a whole day in the elevator in order, she said, ‘to do the thinking work’. On another day she just calmly sat by her desk and stared ahead at law division’s office. She had hidden several cameras early in the morning in the office to document people’s reactions.

The unwritten rules, habits and practices of a work place became perceptible and re-examined during the process, feeding into her multi-channel video installation entitled The Trainee (2008), which has received worldwide recognition. Pilvi Takala will return to Kiasma in spring 2018 with a solo exhibition. She has started to prepare another exceptional project, but that is another story.

The editorial board of FNG Research has selected its first three research interns from Helsinki and Jyväskylä Universities based on an open call for applications earlier this spring. We were happy to find out that the interns had done their homework, and priority was given to students whose applications were based on a concrete and defined part of the FNG collections and especially to previously unstudied and topical materials. We’ll return to their essays on selected research matters later this year. We are happy to welcome our new interns with innovative insights!

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Featured image: Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008. Installation shot, Kiasma 2009. Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen

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