15.02.2006: mythical parrots, whimsical clocks ...

Last day in Helsinki today, and I have to tell you about the amazing art gallery I visited. It's called Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and it's like a gigantic version of MCA in Sydney. The whole thing is housed in a steel-glass fortress with a sort of corkscrew design on the inside, so you get swept along from one floor to the next without even really being aware of it.

Kiasma's currently hosting an exhibition called Ars '06, which has works in it by 40 artists from 24 countries. I spent hours in there marvelling, and saw a ton of good stuff. Let me just pick a few highlights to ramble about.

Okay. The very first thing you come across in Ars '06 is a whole-room installation called Inner Force, created by a Taiwanese artist called Shu-Min Lin. The way it 'works' is this: the whole room is lit in electric blue and there's a large screen on the floor with a big plastic chair at either end. On the screen is a fishpond with carp swimming around in it. You get one person sitting in each chair, they each have EEG probes attached to their heads, and they try to affect what happens on the screen. It's basically a competition to see which of the two guinea pigs can become more relaxed; each person's alpha waves are measured and, as they become calmer, lotus flowers drop gently into the pond and 'capture' the carp.

I was talking to one of the curators about this installation. She told me the undisputed champion in the relaxation contest was a six-month-old infant who'd come to Kiasma a few weeks earlier. Apparently no-one could get near this tiny buddhette in terms of sheer cruisiness.

I started thinking about my class of 10-12 year-old kiddies, and the constant struggle I have to keep them calm and seated. A few times I've actually sat down crossed-legged on the floor, held up my hands in a wheel-shaped mudra (where you make a circle with your thumb and index finger, symbolising turning the wheel of dharma) and threatened to start an impromptu meditation session unless they settle. Once I even struck fear into their wildly-thrashing 10y.o. hearts by suggesting that we might learn to play citar in the following lesson if they couldn't find another way to calm down. These idle threats generally buy me ... oh, I don't know, maybe three minutes of concentration. But I'm thinking what I really need is a six-month-old Finnish girl for my sugar-crazed, hyperactive students to hold during class; maybe some of her serenity would rub off on them.

Anyway, I loved this installation and enjoyed the relaxation game but, frankly, I kinda sucked at it. It was almost embarrassing to see how few lotus flowers were appearing on my side of the pond! So I schlepped on through the steel-glass corkscrew, into a darkened two-storey room. The room was empty, but the floor and walls were covered with giant data projections. This was part of a huge computer-based artwork called Cycle One, which pitted opposing ideas against one another using software pioneered by meteorologists and financial analysts.

Weather forecasts and stock market fluctuations were two of the fields most carefully studied during the gestation period of chaos theory; they were thought to be great places to look if you wanted to observe the strange fractal processes which are part of nature's inner workings, but which had previously escaped the notice of classical physicists. So in other words, this installation pretty much boils down to amateur chaos theory in graphic form. The ideas 'reproduce' copies of themselves inside overlapping regions, but where the regions intersect they can interact in odd ways to make random combinations of words. It's like watching schools of thought competing with one another, and ideas morphing into a negation of themselves. Representing this process visually is not exactly a new idea, but it's still pretty impressive to see, especially on such a large scale.

From there I wandered on through a long and winding sequence of rooms which contained much else of interest, until I came to a little vestibule area. Here on one side of the vestibule, there was a doorway with a sign on it that said "Stability in Solitude", and another sign to the left saying "Please remove your footwear", with a little illustration of shoes and a shoeless foot. "Okay", I thought. "Interesting."

I took off my shoes and left them in the care of an attendant, then walked into a small dark room with gilded floorboards. In the middle of the floor was a boulder. As I stepped in, I thought I felt the floor wobble. Further steps confirmed this – the boards were highly unstable! The boulder lurched towards me and I tried to get out of its way, but more wobbling ensued and I had some trouble maintaining my balance. Eventually, though, I figured out how to walk around with smooth movements and make the floor work for me rather than against me.

So then two teenaged girls stepped into the installation and, of course, bedlam ensued. They were trying to get used to how the floor worked, I was trying to make my way around, our footfalls were out of sequence and we were pushing the boards in different directions. It was all I could do to remain on my feet. Then two more shoeless folk entered, bringing the room up to capacity. Suddenly I realised what was going on here (or at least arrived at a subjective interpretation); the artist was cleverly illustrating the difficulties of staying on one's own path in life, and how they increase and become more complex as the you increase the number of Other People in the equation.

I think this may have been the precise moment when I decided that – regardless of what happens with Maya or anything else – I definitely won't be renewing my contract in Moscow. It suddenly seemed obvious. I mean, imagine a room like this large enough to hold ten million people. How could I possibly hope to find any stability, with all those footfalls shaking the ground on which I was trying to 'find my path'?

On the top floor of Kiasma, one end of the building opens out to give you a nice fat panoramic view of the Mannerheimintie and surrounding bits of downtown Helsinki. This was the last part of Ars '06 I came to, and here I found one of the most enjoyable installations in the whole gallery. It was a piece entitled Genesis According to Parrots by an Argentinian artist called Sergio Vega; a re-telling of the biblical creation story, using wildlife documentary footage to have parrots re-tell the tale with a few bizarre additions.

I recently read an interview with Vega, and it appears he's something of a mad parrot enthusiast. Or perhaps I should put those two things separately – he's mad, and also a parrot enthusiast. The point of inspiration for his work is that, in The Book of Genesis, all the creatures who lived in the Garden of Eden could talk. According to the tale (says Vega) they lost their voices after The Fall. To be honest, I don't actually remember that part of the story, but I'm more willing to take his word for it than I am to go combing through the turgid text of Genesis to prove him wrong. But then mad Sergio makes the point that not all animals lost their voices, because parrots can talk. So, with their colours of paradise, their unusual intelligence and their vocal abilities, it would make sense that parrots would have their own version of how things went down with Adam and the Big G. In Genesis According to Parrots (with the help of subtitles), Sergio gives them the chance to call it as they saw it.

This odd idea becomes a sneaky, pointed allegory on the colonisation of the Americas by white Europeans. As well as being that, though, it's also a spectacle I never could've imagined seeing. To have a parrot staring straight at you down a camera lens, telling you that one day you'll be dust, is a strangely unsettling experience; also somewhat hilarious and, I found, extremely difficult to tear my eyes away from. So I stayed in this room for ages, listening to the birds re-tell creation from their own rather novel and refreshing point of view. It was very cool.

As I said at the start, this is only a tiny selection of what I saw at Kiasma. There was plenty more, but the limitations of digital photography and the desire not to send you all to sleep make me disinclined to ramble any further on this subject.

There is one thing that deserves an honourable mention, though. After Kiasma I headed over to the National Museum of Finland. It was quite a learning experience, this, charting the history of Finland from the Stone Age to the present day. For example, it's amazing what you learn about WWII in this part of the world. I mean, naturally the Russian version of what happened is entirely different from what most of us learned in our history books, and I've enjoyed finding out about that. But in Helsinki I've learned that, from a Finnish perspective, WWII actually comprised not one but two separate and clearly delineated conflicts, with different names and objectives and a peaceful period in the middle. Interesting, no?

However, that isn't actually the main thing I wanted to point out.

One of the more fascinating exhibits in the National Museum was their collection of 18th and 19th century Finnish folk furniture. Apparently grandfather and grandmother clocks became the thing to have in the 18th century Finnish home, and their designs were ... well, pretty whimsical in a lot of cases. There was a wide selection on display in the Museum, some of which were personified as actual grandmothers. I especially liked the one pictured; to me, she seemed to be glaring at a recalcitrant child as it came wheeling through the back door of the farmhouse, late (yet again) for dinner. If there was a speech balloon above the clock, I'm thinking it'd say "And where have you been, young man?"

This really struck me as something that mightn't have been too out of place in Kiasma. I can almost see it as an 'ancestor of modern art'. It has a playful whimsy about it that you're more likely to see in a modern-themed exhibition (at least in my experience) than in a collection of 'serious classics'.

And that was my last full day in Helsinki.

Leaving Finland tomorrow will be a mixed-emotions kind of a thing, I'm thinking. On the one hand, we've certainly seen some great stuff here, it's been interesting and varied, and I've managed to get a bit of a 'feel' for this very pleasant city. Plus, we're both looking keenly forward to Tallinn, so it'll be exciting to be on our way. But on the other hand, as with the other Scandinavian capitals I've visited, Helsinki leaves me feeling that the 'heart and soul of the country' isn't here. It seems more likely that you'd find it amid the endless conifers of the Lakes District, or in the remoteness of ancient Karelian hamlets, or etched into the stark landscapes of Lappland ... you know, all those 'off the beaten path' places. Enjoying the pleasant, arty capital city vibe is nice, but I don't personally see it as the #1 reason to be in Scandinavia. So I'm sad that (apart from our day-trip to the wooden village of Porvoo) we didn't manage to get out there in the Out There. I think Maya would agree.

Oh well. Next time, perhaps.