Dr Leevi Haapala, Director of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art since Summer 2015, began his university studies in Turku and moved to Helsinki in connection with his civilian national service in Summer 1994.

“I was the first non-military serviceman at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I got to work on the ARS95 exhibition at Ateneum, where the Museum was still housed in the early 1990s.”

After his discharge from national service, Leevi Haapala stayed in Helsinki and attended the Vasari programme, jointly run by the Academy of Fine Arts and the Art History Department of the University of Helsinki. This degree programme on art writing was named after Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century Italian considered to be the first art historian. While on the programme, he learned to know Dr Riikka Stewen, who would later be his dissertation supervisor. Another teacher on the Vasari programme was Dr Altti Kuusamo, now professor of Art History at the University of Turku.

“I took a study module in the Vasari programme and I also studied aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. But in the end I arranged my studies so that I graduated from the University of Turku. When I started on my doctoral dissertation in 2003, it was natural to do it in Helsinki, as I was already familiar with people at the university.”

In 2011, Leevi Haapala defended his doctoral thesis The Unconscious in Contemporary Art. The Gaze, Voice and Time in Finnish Contemporary Art at the Turn of the Millennium.