By Marita Muukkonen & Max Ryynänen 16.6.2012
One beautiful spring evening we opened a wormhole from Helsinki to Tallinn to have a chat with Anders Härm – a famous arts personality in Estonia who is involved in the creation of EKKM (www.ekkm.ee/en/), an artist run contemporary art museum.
Marita Muukkonen & Max Ryynänen:
Anders, we think the idea to put up one’s own contemporary art museum is hilarious – and even more so since it kind of is ‘artist run’. Could you tell us more about it? In your own words: what is the actual background of EKKM? Why was it started and how did you get it going?
Anders Härm:
Well, I must admit I myself wasn’t there at the very beginning. There were Neeme Külm and Marco Laimre, who were searching for a studio, and then they stumbled upon this place. They thought that it was just too good to be only a studio, and they got the idea to put up a public gallery. So, they invited me and Elin Kard to join them. Elin is a gallerist at the Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn.
MM & MR:
How would you define your role here – this is something run by artists, right? We are used to hearing about artist run galleries, but this is a museum?
AH:
Well, it kind of came about by accident, because when this all happened, Kumu (Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art) had just opened, and at the same time they had closed the contemporary art branch at Rotermann Salt Storage. Suddenly you had everything packaged together in one place: heritage, contemporary exhibitions, and permanent displays from the 19th century up to the 1980s. Until then, the branch in Rotermann had acted as if it was an independent museum. Now everything had changed, the old scene was all gone, and we felt that Kumu was, as well, too official, too controlled, and too much looking like a castle of art rather than a venue for contemporary art shows. Compared to the Rotermann days, Kumu was slow and academic. This is why we started joking about naming our place a Contemporary Art Museum. We didn’t have any – just artist run spaces and alternative initiatives! Probably it’s the Eastern European thing again – some things are always upside down here. In a conversation with Marco we ended up then saying: let’s call this dump hole a museum… It was not about criticizing our colleagues who work at Kumu. They are doing good and professional work there. It is about the fact that everything today is so different, and we had to act.
MM & MR:
Have you made this museum official? Or do you just call it a museum? Here (in Finland), for example, it is just a question of bureaucracy to put up an official museum. (This is probably connected to the fact that Finland has one museum for every 5000 inhabitants.) And: do you have a collection?
AH:
Well, we are acting like a museum, or, perhaps this would be more correct: we are performing to be a real museum – borrowing this notion from Kunsthalle Lissabon, which is somewhat comparable to EKKM. We haven’t bothered to officially become a museum. But we do have a collection! Apparently this is something you have to have according to ICOM definitions.
MM & MR:
What kind of responses and comments have you gained in Tallinn? How have artists reacted? What about mainstream institutions? And do you know about similar projects? We know, for example, the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik…
AH:
Well, opinions vary. But to be honest: I don’t think that the artists have bothered to think much about it. Some of them are just glad that they have a place to exhibit at, and a place that is rocking. But for us, and maybe particularly for me, the notion of a museum became very important – to question the very idea of a “museum”. Some institutions and official representatives are taking us seriously; some others are still skeptical. But the context has changed as well. First Tartu Art Museum was closed as an independent museum, and it became a branch of the Estonian Art Museum. So, now all state run art museums were suddenly under one umbrella – Kumu included. And the second thing that heavily polarized the local art world was the restitution of the 1980s at the Kunsthalle Tallinn which was accomplished by firing the curators and restoring the institution to something like it was in Soviet times. The whole art world in Estonia belongs to two corporations – the Artist Union, which owns 7 exhibition places (including the Kunsthalle and its galleries) and the Estonian Art Museum. In this narrowed playground we felt that EKKM had suddenly become more important. Although the house is still a wreck, we have gathered quite a considerable amount of symbolic capital during the past two years.
About other cases which are close to ours: Kunsthalle Lissabon operates almost the same way as we do. Luis Silva, who is a young curator (he just came out from de Appel) runs it, and he is coming to Tallinn this spring. I am hoping to exchange more information about their activities.
MM & MR:
Here, on the other side of the Gulf, we have had a long debate for and against the Guggenheim coming to Helsinki. A group of independent artists and curators have instead suggested putting up a center called Checkpoint Helsinki. This would then become a part of the Helsinki City Art Museum. They’d put up Checkpoint Helsinki with 2-3 million euros… What would be your proposal and price for having a branch in Helsinki?
AH:
For 2-3 million euros we’d make miracles!
MM & MR:
What would your model be like? What would you bring in?
AH:
As a branch of the EKKM in Helsinki, we could propose a Museum of Contemporary Art for the Finland-Swedish minority and the Roma people as well.
Well, that was a joke – of course. If we’d really be in this situation, we’d think that it all depends on local needs. We’d do some background research first, but we wouldn’t charge a million. It would all start by having intense discussions with local artists, curators, gallery owners, theorists… We’d need to know what is really missing and what could be done.
MM & MR:
You award an art prize as well. Would you like to tell more about it?
AH:
This is probably the most traditional thing of all our activities, but it was something that was also missing here. We stole our model from the Turner Prize and improved it. The art prize is actually partly the reason that we are now taken quite seriously. Usually these prizes tend to be quite dull, but we managed last year to raise a huge interest in it and so we activated quite many desire machines. We have the whole shebang: 5 nominees, an exhibition, a documentary shown both on National Television and in the Art House Cinema, a kind of a punk gala and an award ceremony, a jury for it, and a people’s choice award. Every nominee gets a personal catalogue, and the winner gets quite a distinguished sum of money in local terms. The money is donated by private capital, which here barely ever pays such sums to cultural events.
MM & MR:
Last question: tell us your vision and program for the future? Who are the artists you show?
AH:
We are putting up the program together collectively since we can make only 4-5 exhibitions per year (the house has no heating). We are getting more and more international and trying to involve more and more artists. Our artists range from students to Martin Creed and Istva Kantor, who is doing the solo show after the Köler Prize. We are trying not to let ourselves be stigmatized with the term “alternative” or with any other term for that matter. We are planning to renovate the house in order to start operating throughout the year, and in the future we’d also like to build an extension. But since the EKKM has, from the beginning, always responded to local needs, it is very hard to tell you what the long term vision is.