The mood at the Estonian Art Museum is upbeat today. The 18th birthday celebrations began on February 15, and 18 events are scheduled over the weekend.

"The world of art and culture is moving and changing fast. I wasn't there at the beginning of Kumu in 2006, /.../ but if you look at the spatial solutions or how Kumu was born in 2006, it already shows that the priorities were on education; for example, we had our own ceramics workshop from the start. You can already see how things have evolved in terms of hosting high quality art exhibitions," the director said.

Polli said the museum plans to transform the entire lobby area for its 20th anniversary. "This is the direction in which the museum is moving in general as a space for experiencing art," she said. "From their first steps, museum visitors should feel a sense of comfort and openness, of social and communal togetherness, rather than arriving at a place of high art."

"Maybe the image of the museum where children have to lower their voices, which Kumu wasn't too keen on from the beginning, is something that needs to be changed," she said.

Last year, the Kumu Art Museum was surprised by its impressive attendance numbers: 160,000 people visited the museum, with more than 90,000 of them coming to see one exhibition. This is also the highest number of visitors ever to a single show at Kumu.

"We also received major awards and several strong exhibitions were produced by our own, great team," Polli said.

2023 was almost an ideal year, she said, with praise coming from the public and the profession. "We had a successful Teamlab exhibition with a very large number of visitors. But we are also very pleased to have received industry recognition for two exhibitions of Estonian art, which we produced entirely in-house."

Kumu hosts a number of special exhibitions each year, as well as three permanent shows. When planning the schedule, she said, it is important to think about how to combine them and what would appeal to both an Estonian and an international audience.

Kumu also continues the National Gallery's tradition, i.e., dealing with art history from a contemporary art perspective, with scholarly proceedings in art history published yearly. 

"The issues facing contemporary art and the museum world are international, even universal. There are environmental concerns, of course, or the anthropocene, and we are all trying to make sure that women artists get solo shows," she said.

"Of course, a museum is not a cheap structure and there are unavoidable energy costs associated with storing works that we take into custody, as if by contract, in perpetuity."

Kumu is the Art Museum of Estonia's main "production unit" for bringing Estonian art to the world, she said.

"On the occasion of the Republic of Estonia's centennial in 2018, internationalization went through an unparalleled surge, with Estonia contributing to major exhibitions worldwide at the time. But the pandemic closed many of the doors that had been opened then. It was a hard break. Now it seems to me that in 2023 the attention is back," she said.

There is something to celebrate again this weekend – Kumu turns 18 and there are tours, talks and workshops to mark the occasion.

Also today, February 18, Kumu invites art lovers of all ages to participate in guided and independent activities. Besides the permanent exhibitions, the focus is also on the temporary shows "Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė" and "Borderless Universe in Their Minds: Italian Transavantgarde and Estonian Calm Expressionism."

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