Sairaala taiteen näyttämönä

Näkökulmia sairaalataiteen tutkimukseen

Abstract

In recent years, several new hospitals have been built and the old ones enlarged or renovated in Finland. Plenty of art has been purchased and placed in these hospitals as research has shown that art can promote health and wellbeing. The art purchased for hospitals and exhibited in them can be called hospital art. In this article, we critically discuss how hospital art has been previously researched, what kind of spaces for art hospitals are, and what kind of opportunities and challenges they provide for art historians both as working environments and as research subjects. The empirical part of the article draws on our observations in four Finnish hospitals: Hospital Nova of Central Finland, Kuopio University Hospital, Mikkeli Central Hospital, and New Children’s Hospital in Helsinki.