plastics museum

Regional vacancies as places of experience and meeting points for art: as part of “Salt Lake Cities – STOPs and STATIONs”, a project of the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024, young artists from Austria and abroad were invited to research, live and work in vacant railway stations and to activate them with artistic contributions. Lazar Lyutakov’s work was created at Tauplitz railway station and is now being shown at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna.

“Plastics Museum Haus Wittgenstein”
The artwork is based on Lyutakov’s collection of over 600 plastic bowls and kitchen utensils. The objects have been collected all over the world since 2006, were created during numerous journeys and have served as material for his “Lamp Series” lighting objects – a series that has been continuously expanded since 2006.

For the project “Salt Lake Cities – STOPs and STATIONs”, the pieces were inventoried in a residency at Tauplitz station between May and July 2024 and declared a kind of museum. The arrangement and presentation of the exhibits create several technological, geographical and stylistic narratives that present design as an instrument for understanding social groups and consumer practices. The material plays a key role here, as plastic used to be associated with the progressive meaning that was to revolutionise all areas of life in a positive way. In contrast to the previously positively connoted progressive development of the material during industrialisation, plastic has now become a supposed symbol of the global environmental crisis.

With “new vulcanicity” force, industry produced a “new geology”. Thus matter, without random eruption or sedimentation, acquires a transfigured reality of its own. For a dumb prehistory, sparring of traces and reasons, this “industrial age” gives man an images of victorious peregrination. A reasonable chemistry, though mysterious to the point of being illogical, replaces a, seemingly not reasonable, logical geology. Since Chaos and the unknown down of time, matter has been a truth to be found out.
 * Lucca Scacci Gracco |  Pensieri di Plastica, Arnoldo Mondatori Editore, 1986

Lazar Lyutakov was born in 1977 in Shabla, Bulgaria. His works were part of the 58th Venice Biennale, where he represented Bulgaria together with Rada Boukova, the 6th Moscow Biennale, 1st Vienna Biennale, 1st Linz Triennale. He has realised solo exhibitions at the Secession Vienna, Monade Contemporary Kyoto, Galerie Charim Vienna, SIMIAN Copenhagen, among others. Lazar Lyutakov has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Callirrhoe Athens, Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi, The Brno House of Arts, Belvedere Museum Vienna, Gallery 400 Chicago, AKKU Stuttgart, GGM2 Gdansk, Fotohof Salzburg, Kunsthaus Muerz, Triade Foundation Timisoara, Nha San Duk Studio Hanoi