A presentation at ”Museums and Faith” –conference in Luxembourg 14–16.5.2009 by Teresa Leskinen, Museum Director of Orthodox Church Museum of Finland.

Respected colleagues and conference participants,

When you look in a mirror, what do you see? Do you see what you want to see, whatever it is that you would like to see, or just the frame, with no picture at all? It’s a good thing to ask yourself this question from time to time. It provides a useful reflecting surface and arouses new ideas, in a museum as in many other places. What, how, why and for whom? We have tried to find answers to these questions in the case of the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland (which I will refer to from now on simply as the Orthodox Church Museum or the Church Museum). In fact these questions are particularly relevant at the present moment, as we are in the midst of planning a new layout for our permanent exhibition. The existing exhibition has remained virtually unchanged for the last 40 years.

It is impossible to understand culture without a knowledge of religions, for the structures of human thinking, language and culture are tightly bound up with religion. We are living in a multicultural age, when a number of cultures, all different and all distinctive in their own way, exist side by side within the same society. The Orthodox Church, which has itself had to struggle for its existence at times during the history of the Finnish nation, teaches us tolerance, gives us a joy in life that dispels prejudices and represents a richness of culture that provides an abundance of interfaces for cooperation.

Every age gives rise to museums of its own. The Orthodox Church Museum was founded in 1957, to help the people evacuated from the territories of Karelia on the eastern border of Finland that had been lost to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War to establish themselves in their new homes in other parts of the country. They were refugees in their own country, but had easily come to be branded as outsiders, as foreigners in effect. The Church Museum tried to recapture what had been lost: the regular cycle of services in the local church or chapel and the icons in the corner of the living room at home. It served as a psychological bridge with places and times from the past, and the objects in the glass cases helped to reproduce common narratives and memories.

But “a museum is more than just a collection of objects in glass cases,” as was noted in a development programme drawn up for the Orthodox Church Museum some twenty years ago. This simple statement tells us something not only about the time when it was made but also about the idea of what a museum of the future should be, and it is still relevant today. I shall try to expand on this theme as I consider the ideas behind the renewal of our permanent exhibition in the light of the above quotation.

A museum gathers its strength and sense of purpose from its “objects in glass cases” and from the people who look after them and those who come to see them. The objects themselves are dumb and need the people who view and experience them in order to allow them to speak. On the other hand, what it is that the visitors see, hear and understand from what they experience will depend on their cultural background.  It is this conveying of stimuli and reproducing of experiences that poses the real challenge for our museum. There must be something for every visitor, something that can be interpreted in the form of reactions and conclusions that create chains of associations. The interpretations will never be complete, however, but will be constantly changing. At the same time the changes taking place in our world-view require us to be critical about the ways in which we categorize things.

Our advantages as a museum lie in the expertise that we possess and the unique nature of the material on display. The original nucleus of the collection was created in the historical exhibition begun at the Monastery of Valamo on an island in Lake Ladoga in 1911. As was the custom at the time, the exhibition rooms were full to overflowing with objects of all kinds: sacramental vessels, icons and both artistically and historically valuable liturgical vestments and textiles. There were also many special exhibits, rarities and curiosities. All the objects that we have on display nowadays have one thing in common: survival from the war, when the monastery also had to be evacuated, and in many cases amazing stories are told of the ways in which these objects were rescued and preserved intact.

As museum professionals, we are aware that glass cases not only protect the objects inside them but also separate them off from the outside world. The rows of glass cases in the Orthodox Church Museum are iconic in a sense, all very much the same and apt to reduce our unique collection of items to a common denominator. In addition, the sheer number of items is likely to put the viewer off – one set of communion vessels after another – so that the general abundance of objects causes the viewer to concentrate on the whole rather then the details. As you go round the museum it is essential to make choices, because it is virtually impossible to examine individual items in detail.

There is insufficient room, either physically or mentally, for all the meanings attached to the exhibits, and in any case, what should a sacramental vessel look like in a secular museum? Should it speak to us through its religious connotations? When divorced from the purpose for which they were intended, objects such as a chalice or paten can still serve as visible marks of what remains invisible. In the case of an exhibition in a museum the emphasis shifts to the meanings that we can construct for visitors, creating a form of interaction in which the design of the exhibition and the narratives attached to the exhibits are of the utmost importance.

If the exhibition is spaciously designed, visitors can drift through it in a fruitful manner, experiencing and indulging in the exhibits – whether they like them or not. The space available can also be decisive as far as understanding and interpreting the objects is concerned. The relations between memory, space and power easily become closely intertwined, and to attain an overall visual effect the exhibition has to be designed with the particular space in mind and with an idea of how visitors will move through this space.

The great advantages that the Orthodox Church Museum possesses lie in the architecture and location of its building. Forty years on from its completion in 1969 it is still an outstanding example of modern architecture in Kuopio, the leading city of Eastern Finland, which houses the administrative and spiritual centre of the Orthodox Church in Finland in rather the same way as Rome houses the Vatican. It would be possible to extend the physical premises of the museum by adding a new wing to the building, by opening up the existing exhibition space or by taking some of the present closed-off storage space into use for exhibition purposes. The most important thing of all in the reconstruction of the permanent exhibition will nevertheless be to achieve a museum that is on the move, a museum that is full of surprises, that does not reveal everything at once and that is caught up in the process of change. This means that its design should be analytical and discursive and should maintain good control over the content. Whose desk should we leave the commission on – that of an architect, an interior designer, a theatrical designer or an industrial designer?

If we want to be something more than just a collection of objects in glass cases – as our quotation maintains – then what should we be? Perhaps it is enough to be a specialized museum of national importance that is unique in the whole of Western Europe and is now setting out on the path of change.

Museums are the builders of identities, and an identity – as the word implies – is strengthened by identification, and by negative concepts of what I am not and where I do not belong. Thus museums and the exhibits in them serve as mirrors of the inner being. As museum professionals, we have to have our feelers finely tuned, to tell us what we can do, what we can display and how we can do it. It is not inevitable that everyone will want to step inside the Church Museum, and for those who do, the reasons for doing so may be highly varied. One thing is clear, however, that the purpose is not to attack people with the Bible, or to whip up a religious spirit. We wish rather to tell people calmly of a tradition that goes back a thousand years and dispel any prejudices that they may have on the subject.  We have an open outlook on the world and are prepared to take bold steps in the direction of physical and intellectual accessibility – by reflecting phenomena and events, identifying with them and pointing out contrasts.

Artists borrow features of cultures and religions for use in their works, and in the field of art – in this case church art – we have played our part in working with material that is alien to us. A short time ago we arranged a multicultural workshop for the children of immigrant families, setting out from the need to identify. They are in a strange country where everything is new and rather exhausting, just like the evacuees after the last war. Because of the dramatic history that lies behind it, the Church Museum has already been conceived of as an institution for helping people to feel at home; its visitors have sought to orient themselves in terms of time and place, and have been able to use the information provided by it for gaining an intimation of their past. Who in fact am I, and can I find myself in the museum? And if not, then where on earth can I find myself?

The workshop on “Pictures as a Common Language”, which was part of the Finnish National Gallery’s project entitled “Art for Us, at Once!”, was directed at young people who had recently moved to this country. As they had only a rudimentary command of Finnish, the principal means of communication was the basic unit of the museum’s collection, the icon. Through icons, pictures, the participants set out to fulfil the purpose of the project, which was to create pictures of themselves – their origins, religions, memories and fancies. They were also curious to find out about values that were alien to them.

Thus a museum and its collection can reflect the inner person. Indeed, a museum is at its best when it can surprise its visitors on a personal level. Experiences of this do not necessarily arise from reading five sentences on a showcase panel, but rather from memories of emotions. Put bluntly, I have often noticed that “I forget what I have read, but remember what I have felt.” A good exhibition in a museum will provide a telling experience which will succeed in arousing discussion and reflection. Very often what you need in order to learn from a physical experience is to begin by losing yourself in time and space. It is quite possible to lose yourself in a museum.

A museum should be a place where a visitor can stand still and contemplate things in peace. And it should be at the same time archaic, or sacred, and unfinished, on the move. By unfinished, I mean that it should be possible to go further into a subject by following an artist’s programme, for instance. I would be happy to learn about the traditional Byzantine art of mosaics, for example, by watching an artist at work in the Church Museum and seeing the result installed there.

As an expert organization, the Orthodox Church Museum is engaged in helping to build identities and analyse world-views through the medium of religion and religious phenomena. I believe that it should be an open learning environment for visitors of all persuasions, and I hope that it can serve in the future as a forum for discussions across the boundaries between religions.

The multinational and multicultural world is on our doorstep, and it is our job to let it in. As openers of the door and people capable of stepping inside and outside, we are engaged in reconstructing our Finnish national identity. It is important to reconsider this identity at the present moment, when there are so many frameworks to which we can belong. Who is it that stares back at us when we look in the mirror, and what, in the last resort, do we see there? As a creative learning environment, a temple of creativity, the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland wishes to respond to the challenges of the times, which is fundamentally a question of the idea of a museum.