residency + exhibition: a critical view on plastic

We are excited to announce an open call for the artist residency project “A Critical View on Plastic”, open to 1-3 individual artists. At least one will be an artist-in-residence at Art in Lov Residence, while the others can be local artists from the Loviisa region, either showcasing their own project or collaborating with the resident artist.

Residency Period: 5th March – 5th June 2025, one to three months so that the artist is in Loviisa during week 22 when the exhibition is built and opened.

Exhibition: During these three months, the selected artist(s) will develop work or a body of works for an exhibition shown in parallel to the Loviisa Town Museum’s exhibition on the history of plastic production in Loviisa. The exhibition will take place in the museum’s summer exhibition spaces, located in the vaulted grey stone cellar of the museum building, featuring red brick and plaster walls and a sand floor. Works exhibited here will be exposed to high humidity, so the space is not suitable for works on paper or other humidity-sensitive materials.

Plastic Fantastic – When Plastic Arrived to Loviisa

Loviisa Town Museum’s upcoming exhibition discusses how plastic became a part of the local residents’ everyday lives and how the plastic industry blossomed in the region of Loviisa after the end of the Second World War. At the Strömfors mill in Ruotsinpyhtää, both the sawmill and the iron mill were closed down and were replaced by a plastic factory in 1947. Sanka Oy, another plastic factory in the Loviisa region, was established a few years later in 1950. A few years down the line, it became one of Finland’s largest manufacturers of acrylic glass. In Kuninkaankylä, Polykem made their round futuristic Futuro-houses from reinforced plastic. The same material was also used in Köpbacka by Fibera Oy in the process of making some of the world’s first plastic glider planes.

The history of the plastic industry goes hand in hand with the history of Finnish design. Well-known Finnish designers such as Yki Nummi, Tapio Wirkkala, Liisa Johansson-Pape, and Heikki Turunen designed light fixtures, dishes, and other everyday items that were manufactured in plastic factories located in the Loviisa region.

In post-war Finland, plastic was seen as the material of the future that offered great opportunities. However, the future has also shown us the unwanted consequences of plastic consumption. Today, the usage of plastic is greater than ever before, and its environmental impacts are enormous. To create some contrast to our exhibition’s atmosphere of the post-war plastic utopia, we wish to find contemporary works of art that bring to light the more problematic aspects of the usage, production, and consumption of plastic.

We encourage artistic projects that address the theme of Sustainability, defined as meeting our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. This includes not only environmental but also social and economic sustainability.