Friday 13th May
Arrived in Helsinki late last night, a much more pleasant flight experience than the usual Ryan Air cattle shed. After an all too brief night’s sleep we were up again at 7:30 to get to our first appointment with Timo Soppela, director of Galleria Muu http://www.muu.fi/
Muu translates roughly as ‘the other’ and attracted our attention due to their emphasis on experimental practices: “founded in 1987 to represent and promote new and experimental forms of art. These are such as media art, performance, video, environmental, space and conceptual art, sound and other experimental modes of cultural production”.
This focus seemed very fitting for our group, whose work tends to be video, sound or installation based, and our discussion with Timo touched on the relationship between these areas of cultural production and the commercial art world. Part of Muu’s programme is an annual art fair coming up in September which explicitly aims to create a market for these media, apparently with some success in terms of video.
It was interesting to hear that in spite of Finland’s well earned reputation for excellent government support of the arts, there is no equivalent of the Arts Council’s ‘Regularly Funded Organisation’ status here and that he spends much time redoing the same funding paperwork year on year. Timo was also very helpful in making suggestions of other organisations with whom we should meet.
