Report from Finland: Luxury and Museum Exhibitions in the Year '100 Years of Finland', with a focus on 'Pitsi on Pop/Lace and Luxury': Salo Art Museum/Salon taidemuseo, West Finland

Salo is a small southern Finnish town, an hour and half’s drive from Helsinki where you would not necessarily expect to visit a show with the word “luxury” in the title. Once a trading hub and ironworks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a steam-locomotive stop from 1899, the area became well known in the 1970s as the location of the headquarters of Nokia telephones. In a story redolent of global commodity flows, the manufacturing of Nokia phones (once a great luxury in and of themselves around the world, and very expensive in the early 1990s) shifted to Asia. The Nokia monopoly on the new “mobile” technology further declined as others caught up, and the final closure of Nokia product development by Microsoft came with the loss of the last 1100 jobs in 2015. Salo today has halved in population to about 25,000 and has high unemployment with rising social challenges to match. The center of town presents a pleasant river-side vista; metres from the rail line are to be found a small core of elaborate nineteenth-century wooden villas that once belonged to well-to-do merchants and professionals, as well as the market square, proud new council chambers, one upmarket women’s dress shop displaying Marimekko, an excellent Finnish restaurant in a wooden cottage, and a fine regional Art Gallery (Salon taidemuseo/Salo Art Museum)