104. Regional Travel #1.5 - Helsinki's Kiasma Museum

The Kiasma Museum was recommended by one of my wife's friends. It's a branch of the Finnish National Gallery that that focuses on contemporary art, primarily sculptures and video installations. Some of the art is relatively straightforward and other works are strange and unusual, the kind of stuff you might expect to see in someone's basement dungeon. Judge for yourself in the pictures below which works might fall into each category. There is no museum in St. Petersburg with this kind of sensibility, so it was a nice change of pace from the art museums in which I've been spending time these last several months. The top floor featured an excellent research library, which to my surprise seemed to be open to the general public. Most similar museum libraries in the USA tend to exert more control over who they allow to walk in the door.

The Kiasma building is a fitting environment for contemporary art. It was constructed in the late 1990s and matches the architecture of most art museums built in the last 20 years around the world - a lot of acute and obtuse angles, and without a whole lot of 90 degree angles where the walls meet the floors and ceilings. It's in a great location right in the city center, just a couple of blocks away from the train station.