Hilkka Hiiop – Chief Conservator at Kumu
One of the many problems museum conservators have with contemporary or modern art is how to actually conserve and preserve the art works. Many of them were never made to last longer than a couple of months – the duration of an exhibition – or just a couple of hours or days. Not to mention those cases in which art works were not recognized as such and cleaned or thrown away. A nightmare for any artist or conservator.
We talked to Hilkka Hiiop, chief conservator at Kumu, about her job, her PhD and our exhibition!
Many of the employees you meet at Kumu have been there from the very beginning in 2007 when the museum was opened. Some of them had just graduated from college and it was their first job, others had already quite some experience working for other museums in Estonia and abroad. Hilkka Hiiop belongs to the latter. She has been in business for over fifteen years, has worked abroad for most of the time and then decided to head back to the motherland.
In the photos above you see Hilkka at work: she surveys when art works are unpacked and installed, makes sure that they are not damaged and writes condition reports. She has been with the museum from the very beginning in 2006 when Kumu was opened. Hilkka is originally from Tallinn, but has already worked in Berlin, the Netherlands and Rome before returning to her hometown. Not only for us, also for her this exhibition is special:
‘The exhibition is very special in the way that it’s kind of like a ‘parade of hits’. You have so many and so internationally famous works. That is why it is a lot more responsibility for conservators as well. We have been talking about the exhibition already for many many months and preparing ourselves. One of our conservators – Helen – even went to Milano (where the exhibition was before Tallinn) to see the works. In that way we are even more prepared than we usually are.’
When we met her, Hilkka had just gotten her PhD and so we were curious what she wrote about:
‘About contemporary art! How to preserve and conserve contemporary art in general especially in an Estonian Art Museum, about our collection and its management and strategy of preservation: starting from collecting to the preservation process to the active conservation.’
And since we changed the name of our exhibition (from ‘The Desire for Freedom’ to ‘Critique and Crises’), we wanted to know what she thought about that. After a moment of surprise, she admitted that she had never thought about it. Nevertheless, the title did not seem too important to her:
‘I think the visitors are not coming to the exhibition for the title. They come because of the names that are being exhibited here because for Estonia it is really special to have these names. The Estonian audience is not very familiar with contemporary art. I mean modern art, let’s say, but they are not very well educated because of the Soviet period where you almost didn’t have art history courses or education so modern art is not as well-known as in other European countries. But the younger generation is much more familiar with it according to me – I don’t know. They are not coming for the title, but they are coming for the names who are exhibited here.’
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If you go visit our exhibition and by any chance meet Hilkka, say hello to her for us!
And have you met Terje?
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