It would be difficult to miss the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, on a visit to Helsinki. In the 1990s, Finnish politicians made the crucial decision to locate the new museum at the very heart of the city. The building, with its aerodynamic shape, was designed by the American architect Steven Holl and became one of the top cultural attractions in the country immediately after it opened in May 1998.

More than a decade later, Kiasma’s symbolic value is as significant as its actual function. It serves as an embodiment of the presence and importance of contemporary art in our society. Moreover, it acts as a landmark and is a good starting point for a tour of Helsinki’s art scene. Many of the most important art institutes and galleries are either next door to Kiasma or only a few blocks away. Kiasma’s exhibitions have an emphasis on Finnish art and the art of neighbouring regions.

What did Helsinki have to offer before Kiasma? A few commercial galleries with an international flavour; the National Gallery, the Ateneum, with its dignified masters, a surprisingly large number of whom were women; Kunsthalle Helsinki, run by artists; and some smaller art museums whose exhibition programmes seemed to be doing too much at once, trying to serve the entire field of visual arts. When Kiasma opened, these galleries were forced to consider their own images more carefully.

If you were looking for high-quality contemporary art, you often had to travel to other cities. Many important exhibitions were – and, indeed, still are – held at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere and the Pori Art Museum. Likewise, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm was only a short ferry ride away.

Although the recession of the 1990s hit Finland extremely hard, Helsinki did not become a cultural wasteland. Admittedly, the recession proved damaging to galleries and collectors who had previously experienced great success and presented Kiasma with an international collection of contemporary art. However, the recession brought about a situation where artists took responsibility for themselves, alternative galleries grew in stature and new galleries were formed. Another factor that revitalized the art scene was the opening of borders with the Baltic countries and Russia.

The recession also had a real impact on art itself. The large, heavy paintings of the 1980s no longer reflected the zeitgeist: now artists sought out working methods that were both more economical and more conceptual. Photography and media art, along with various kinds of projects, blossomed as the focus of art shifted from the objects to the content of the work.

1995 proved to be a milestone. In that year the newly founded Museum of Contemporary Art – still lacking a building of its own – organized the international ARS 95 exhibition in the Ateneum building. Browsing through the list of artists in the exhibition was like reading a who’s who of contemporary art, featuring names like Miroslav Balka, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Although ARS exhibitions had been organized since the 1960s, the cavalcade that was put together by Tuula Arkio and Maaretta Jaukkuri, the future leaders of Kiasma, was an important signal that Helsinki was no longer an isolated island in the geography of contemporary art, and that the new museum was certainly needed.

One of those who appeared in the exhibition was the Finnish artist Esko Männikkö, for whom it served as a personal breakthrough. Männikkö’s photographs of the lonely men of northern Finland sparked a new interest in Finnish art photography. Männikkö’s photographs can also be likened to Aki Kaurismäki’s melancholy films, which started to win prizes at European festivals at around the same time.

People like Männikkö and Kaurismäki have played a pivotal role in the formation of Finnishness. Their work did not show Finland as a high-tech trendsetter, the picture that the official leaders of Finland wanted to promote. Instead, Finland was depicted through its remote countryside, city outskirts and the marginalized people who drink too much and talk too little. This approach may be referred to as Arctic hysteria, the name fittingly given to an exhibition of Finnish contemporary art.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video works and films draw on a similar source. The Venice Biennale in 1999 can be considered Ahtila’s breakthrough moment, followed by private exhibitions in galleries including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2000) and the Tate Modern (2002), which confirmed her status as the most successful Finnish contemporary artist of all time. While she was working as a teacher in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Ahtila’s works were constantly on display all over the world, arousing a great deal of interest in the specific field of Finnish video art and experimental cinema.

At present, the Helsinki art scene is vibrant, versatile and cosmopolitan. Looking back, however, it is surprising to see how recently this has come about. The real transformation of the art scene occurred in the years following the founding of Kiasma, a time when it faced many challengers.

The most significant of these was the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), which opened in Helsinki’s neighbouring city in 2006. The largest Finnish museum in terms of floor space, EMMA opened its doors with simultaneous retrospectives by Kazimir Malevich and Shirin Neshat, and it has managed to maintain an ambitious programme; this year, for instance, the museum’s exhibited artists include Candice Breitz and Jorma Puranen. Moreover, the museum was the first to display a collection of Finnish art owned and assembled by the Saastamoinen Foundation.

Another competitor is Kunsthalle Helsinki, which has now reopened after renovations, and which many consider being the most beautiful exhibition space in Finland. Like the art halls and centres of contemporary art in central Europe, Kunsthalle Helsinki focuses on the most cutting-edge art, which has made Kiasma’s recent choices appear tame.

The most interesting developments, however, happen outside the big institutions. Of the galleries run by artists, the Hippolyte Gallery, which focuses on photography, the Muu Gallery, run by media artists, and two tiny galleries called Huuto stand out. Another important gallery is the Kluuvi Gallery, managed by the Helsinki City Art Museum, which regularly offers challenging exhibitions by young Finnish artists.

The last fifteen years have seen photography establish itself within the mainstream visual arts. The most obvious example of this is the retrospective of Matti Saanio’s work organized in spring 2008 by the Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum – the first photography exhibition to be held in this museum. Saanio, who died in 2006, was one of the father figures of Finnish photography, and it is almost impossible to think about Männikkö, Puranen and other portrayers of the ‘Northern man’ without reference to the model that he provided.

Exhibitions organized in Finnish and European museums under the name Helsinki School are a special case within Finnish photography. The Helsinki School is not a ‘school’ as such, but rather a marketing project carried out by an art university in Helsinki to publicize the teachers and students of its photography department.

Nevertheless, the Helsinki School brought much attention to Finnish photography and promoted artists, enabling them to make a name for themselves outside the project. The most famous of these are probably Elina Brotherus, Ola Kolehmainen and, of the more recently emerged artists, Susanna Majuri. Their teachers have included the cream of the Finnish crop, including Jorma Puranen and Pentti Sammallahti.

The most important commercial gallery for art photography is Anhava, just next door to Kiasma, which represents many of the artists who made their name in the Helsinki School, including Santeri Tuori and Pertti Kekarainen. The gallery also displays work by the most renowned figures in Nordic photography, such as Tom Sandberg.

Collecting photography is still a relatively new thing in Finland. Mitro Kaurinkoski, the man behind Hippolyte, says that the typical customer is another photographer, while Ilona Anhava finds his best customers at art fairs in Basel or Miami. Only a few works of photography end up in Kiasma or other Finnish museums and public collections.

Although money does not change hands very often, the photography scene is still busy. An important institution in the field is the Finnish Museum of Photography, which carries out vigorous research and exhibition programmes. The museum’s approach to photography is a broad one: in addition to monographic exhibitions, in its recent exhibitions the museum has explored critical perspectives on various phenomena in fashion and newspaper photography and war and political photography, as well as photography books, which are commonly made in Finland.