The Profound Boredom Of Paul Cowan, Bernhard Hegglin, Georgie Nettell, Pilvi Takala, Hanna Törnudd & Annette Wehrmann

The Profound Boredom Of Paul Cowan, Bernhard Hegglin, Georgie Nettell, Pilvi Takala, Hanna Törnudd & Annette Wehrmann

curated by Geraldine Tedder

Opening Saturday 17th of December 6pm
18.12.16 - 21.01.17
Saturdays 12 - 17 or by appointment

Riverside
Schmiedeweg 4, 3048 Worblaufen
www.riverside-space.ch

Detail Is All review by Kate Sutton

frieze.com/article/detail-all

A Rule By Nobody

Image Credit: Liz Magic Laser, still from The Thought Leader, 2015

A Rule By Nobody
Presented by Third Object
As part of the Fall Curatorial Residency
at Sector 2337

The Nightingale Cinema, 1084 N. Milwaukee
Sunday, October 16th, 7 pm, $5

A Rule By Nobody is an exploration of the boredoms, frustrations and pleasures of bureaucratic routines. Drawing its title from Hannah Arendt’s definition of bureaucracy, the exhibition takes the bored energy of office labor and channels it into a multipart dive into the sublimely overflowing inbox, the inky warm Xerox room, the balled up wads of red tape, and the moments of escape that punctuate the droning beige sameness of nine to five.

This video program is a motivational, team-building corporate retreat through other people’s daily grinds. The works in the screening emulate and parody various workplaces and their hierarchical structures to reveal inner formulas, dogmas and breaking points.

Program Details:
Hanne Lippard, Beige, 2013, Germany, digital video, 6m5s, color, sound

Kay Rosen, Sisyphus, 1991/2011, USA, digital video, 2m1s, black and white, no sound

Liz Magic Laser, The Thought Leader, 2015, USA, digital video, 9m21s, color, sound

Simon Denny, Diligent Boardbooks Website Presentation, 2011, Germany, digital video, 1m20s, color, sound

Ellen Nielsen, Flower Office, 2016, USA, digital video, 3m18s, color, sound

Jodie Mack, Unsubscribe #3: Glitch Envy, 2010, USA, 16mm, 5m45s, color, sound

Lawrence Weiner, To and Fro. Fro and To. And To and Fro. And Fro and To., 1972, USA, 1/2” open reel video transferred to digital video, black and white, sound

Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, Finland, digital video, 13m52s, color, sound

Andrew Norman Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, 2009-2011, USA, digital video, 11m3s, color, sound

This exhibition series is organized under the Fall Curatorial Residency at Sector 2337. It is composed of a two-part group exhibition, an ongoing back room installation, a video screening at the Nightingale Cinema, a live performance, and a printed publication.

Third Object is a roving curatorial collective based in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Slow Stretch, Mana Contemporary Chicago; Satellites, The Franklin; Were the Eye Not Sunlike, ACRETV and Fernwey; and Mossy Cloak, Roots and Culture. Third Object is Ann Meisinger, Raven Munsell, and Gan Uyeda.

A Rule By Nobody is made possible through the support of Sector 2337, the Propeller Fund, Direct Office Furniture Warehouse, Video Data Bank and the Nightingale Cinema.

www.facebook.com/events/581777108678065/

Right of Refusal

 MOBILITY IN POST DEMOCRACY

Mon 24 Oct 2016
5.30PM-9.00PM

The New School University Center
Starr Foundation Hall, UL
New York City
Free Admission
 
Mobility in Post Democracy
Post Democracy has recently arisen as a complex and contradictory term: for some it promises a new participatory platform for the mobilizing forces of social media, considered catalysts for political imagination. Others equate Post Democracy with democracy's demise due to the penetration of global capitalism into every regime type coupled with the increasing intervention of international actors in domestic politics. Decried as "democratic melancholy," such skepticism is considered ill placed by yet others for whom "democracy" was never a political system to aspire to.

Under the heading Mobility in Post Democracy, the Vera List Center is presenting a series of interdisciplinary panels, seminars, and lectures that examine Post Democracy as a condition informed by mobility – across institutions, states, and ideologies. The series brings together an international group of scholars, activists, students, and artists to probe the concept of Democracy more generally at the time of the contested U.S. presidential elections, and the concurrent emergence and demise of democratic regimes throughout the world.

Artist-driven, the events aim to ask questions such as: How can new social movements counter networks of power? What creative organizing tactics are being developed to reinvigorate a democratic ethos? What forms of political institutions and alliances are flexible and resilient?

Right of Refusal
With many states on the brink of a democratic collapse, the Mobility in Post Democracy series connects to the simultaneous disdain and opportunity revealed in this moment. On the heels of a keynote address by Wendy Brown, which will reveal the neoliberal mechanisms that have undermined democracy while pointing toward modes of resistance in new organizational models, this panel discussion will consider refusal as another possible strategy to thwart the further erosion of liberal democracy. By framing resistance as a human right, the right of refusal invokes coordinated action, solidarity, and the law to magnify the political implications of individual decisions. These discussions are particularly relevant as voters in the United States consider their options in the forthcoming presidential elections.

Discourses on human rights are primarily concerned with protecting and supporting individuals as active members of society. Active participation requires two general categories of rights: rights that protect individuals from discrimination, oppression, and other forms of harm; and rights to social, political, cultural, and economic resources necessary to participate, often in the form of material support from states.

This seminar focuses on another form of rights that are often overlooked in rights-based discourses: the right to refuse and embrace non-participation. The right of refusal can take many different forms. In the face of increased globalization and hyper-mobility, how can the right to remain stave off urban developers and alter the flow of migrants? Is it possible to opt out of a digital presence through the right to be forgotten? How does the right of refusal challenge the role of the state as protector and provider? For the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, many voters are considering opting out instead of choosing between the Republican and Democratic candidates. What does non-participation mean for our ability to question and critique the government? What are the affordances of collective refusal, as in a boycott? Is refusal a form of protest, a sign of privilege, the mark of apathy, or something else entirely?

The event begins with a film screening/interactive gaming session from 5-6pm in the University Center Event Cafe, followed by a panel discussion from 6:30-8pm exploring the various manifestations the right of refusal may take. The participants in this event argue for the right to refuse action and participation, to remain silent, to reject market principles of efficiency, to refuse to be part of the system. The upcoming U.S. elections provide the context to consider the ramifications of non-participation.

Participants
Colleen Macklin, Associate Professor of Design and Technology, Parsons
Lucas Pinheiro, Lecturer in New Media Art History, Parsons
Joshua Simon, Curator and 2011-2013 VLC Fellow
Pilvi Takala, Artist
Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, New School for Social research

www.veralistcenter.org/engage/events/2024/right-of-refusal/

What You Get Is What You See: The Body at Work

Sunday, Oct. 23rd, 2016
At Uniondocs
7:30pm, $9.
With Filmmaker Pilvi Takala
Part of What You Get Is What You See: A Series on Spectatorship
Co-presented with The Vera List Center at The New School

The Body at Work. Laborious Gestures, Awkwardness and Hostage Spectatorship

Using her own body and presence as a research tool, Artist Pilvi Takala places herself in awkward, uncomfortable but constructive places to investigate social situations and human behavior.

In this screening-presentation, she will look at the creative process behind her narrative videos that emerge from her experiments with others. From a community of poker players in Thailand, a corporation office in the Finland to a boarding school and a text message service in the US, we will follow her infiltration and disguised activities in work settings, witnessing how small but subtle infractions can disrupt people’s sense of purpose and seriously threat social order.

Following the screening and presentation, Pilvi Takala will be in conversation with Mathilde Walker-Billaud.

This event is co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, in connection with the panel-discussion on Monday October 24th: The Right of Refusal.

What You Get Is What You See: A Series On Spectatorship

In What You Get Is What You See, Mathilde Walker-Billaud invites artists, filmmakers and writers to show us how to become more active, more engaged–and perhaps better–spectators. The speakers share their experiences and personal observations as audience members, viewers, readers, watchers, listeners of visual and performance arts, radio, TV, graphic design, cinema and Internet. Through their trained gaze and skilled sensitivity, they disturb and displace our perception of contemporary culture and expose spectatorship as an everyday dynamic act.

322 Union Ave. Williamsburg
Brooklyn, NY 11211

www.uniondocs.org/event/2016-10-23-pilvi-takala/

FAKE. It is not true, it is not a lie.

FAKE. It is not true, it is not a lie.

20 October 2016 - 29 January 2017

IVAM
Guillem de Castro, 118
46003 Valencia

Picassian maxim that the art is a lie that tells the truth remains today. In a world dominated by simulations, by speeches and stories “manufactured” to be true, and an image whose primary condition is part of someone’s sneaky ventriloquism, increasingly practices from creation realm that are ready to dress to camouflage something else to reveal the current truthful regimes. It is the same in an images war. If classical aesthetic was based on goodness, beauty and truth foundations, truthful disruptive practices do not stop asking the same questions, but precisely where nobody expected, when we are fully confident in a space dominated by the comfortable “story” idea, sheltered from frauds and deceptions.

The fake that parasitical and masked format that appears what is not, has become, in many artists’ hands, a weapon that seeks to short-circuit the mass reality manipulation, often using his enemy techniques. However, unlike simple deceit from commercials and political marketing -and also, why not aesthetic- the fake does not seek appearance perpetuation, but as soon as possible to reveal mechanisms and myths that make credibility becomes a possibility: to question, in ultimately, authority linguistic forms, in media, in museums, in academic discourses on moral gossip. With additional problem that often fake also becomes part of the criticizing show, making it authority format.

The exhibition FAKE. It is not true. It is not a lie reviews some camouflages, infiltrations and sabotages undertaken by artists around the world since Orson Welles made credible a Martian attack to expose media’s manipulative power in an increasingly constrained society to certain veracity formats. Artists who invent other artists and ridicule the excellence cultural discourse; documentaries that appear objective realities and that put into question the journalistic resources; performers who feigned roles to blow up certain of what we see or hear; digital artists infiltrated in war games to short-circuit users expectations; false statements submitted in iconic truthful academic museums and end up exposing the fiction and fragility of their power …; not forgetting, of course, the fake is also an inherent format of the power discourse, why FAKE. It is not true. It is not a lie exhibition will show some of the most notorious and terrible fakes institutionally promoted. Ultimately, images war is aimed to establish how we should believe.

Nietzsche said that truths are illusions of which have forgotten that they are.

www.ivam.es/en/exposiciones/fake-it-is-not-true-it-is-not-a-lie/

CURA. NO.23 - A VISIT TO Pilvi Takala. CCA Glasgow

COVER BY JON RAFMAN



INSIDE THE COVER
The Refracting Eye. On Jon Rafman
by Bret Schneider

POP UP SECTION
THE MACHINE
A year-long section edited
by Anthony Huberman

PORTRAITS IN
THE EXHIBITION SPACE
Arnold Rüdlinger: The Dawn of the
Contemporary
by Lorenzo Benedetti

ICONS
Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy
by Vincent Honoré

ARTIST’S PROJECT
by Guan Xiao

SPOTLIGHT
Ian Cheng in conversation
with Elvia Wilk

SPOTLIGHT
Athena Papadopoulos in conversation
with Samuel Leuenberger

SPOTLIGHT
Cayetano Ferrer in conversation
with Olivian Cha

ABOUT
Davide Balula
by Daniel S. Palmer

SPOTLIGHT
Emmanuelle Lainé in conversation
with Flora Katz

ABOUT
The Clothed Condition. Centre
for Style by Matthew Linde
by Anna Gritz

A VISIT TO
Pilvi Takala. CCA – Centre for
Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
with João Mourão & Luís Silva

HOT!
Rachel Maclean
by Siôn Parkinson

Julien Nguyen
by Lorenz Pammer

Louisa Martin
by Frances Loeffler

Antoine Renard
by Philipp Kleinmichel

curamagazine.com/current/

What’s The Riddle

What’s The Riddle
5 October – 5 November
Private View: Tuesday 4 October 18:00-20:30

Pi Artworks London is pleased to announce What’s The Riddle curated by Berlin-based curator Övül Ö. Durmusoglu. What’s The Riddle is the first of five exhibitions that make up Pi Artworks London’s Curatorial Season that runs from October 2016 – July 2017. For the season Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Alexandra Schwartz, Sacha Craddock, Oliver Sumner, and Morgan Quaintance have been invited to devise and develop their own curatorial project working with artists predominantly or entirely from outside the gallery’s roster.

Our personal and political environments are shaped and sometimes traumatised by the choices we are asked to make; like or dislike, yes or no, in or out. They offer no solutions to widespread discontent. Perhaps if the answers cannot suffice, then it’s time to reformulate the questions. A parallel reality where things are organically more complex and diverse requires the artistic ability to critique, to imagine beyond the perceived knowledge, and to shift the collective memory. What’s The Riddle brings together artworks that return to fundamental formal questions of artistic work and its system in their alternative conception of time. Kasper Bosmans, Geta Brătescu, Osman Dinç, Rodrigo Hernández, Ad Minoliti, Anca Munteanu Rimnic, and Pilvi Takala search for the riddle, challenge the drive to seek correct answers, and reconfigure their mythologies.

Osman Dinç looks at the essential, earthly knowledge with artistic questions that are plain, direct and poetic. Choreographing elements like metal, glass, and earth together, Dinç is obsessed with working towards new formulations that address essential earthly knowledge. All his artistic life he has worked in series intertwined with each other in an attempt to stop time. Kasper Bosmans works with curiosities, puzzles, riddles and surprises. He gathers material incessantly, collecting it in notebooks and drawings. His drawings Legend Sint Rombout + Vitiligo [2016] are part of the process of making legends to map out his intuitive thinking where idiosyncratic daily impressions enjoy a playful dialogue with universal, ancestral symbology in the way they appear. In Anca Munteanu Rimnic’s newly conjured photographic triptych the artist speaks of a mesmeric possibility between what was, what is and what if'. Her poetic dialogue with the psychoanalytic computer program Eliza from the 1960s tickles her reader with humour, showing what is lost in the interaction between a machine and a human.

Rodrigo Hernández’s anachronistic narratives are composed of fragments of stories, dreams, and visions. He invites his audience into a playful dialogue with these narratives, to be part of a flowing thread of well-learned questions and images they had forgotten over time. Hernandez works with how we perceive and how we make what is perceived our own. In a time of self-affirmations, he prefers to dissipate essences and their mythologies by edging the spheres of our imagination with a dose of very needed ambiguity. The idea behind Pilvi Takala’s Workers Forum [2016] came from her experience working for a service in the United States where users pay for a pretend girlfriend or boyfriend to text them. Takala was fascinated by the potential in the fictional space created in the text message exchange, but like many of the other workers, she was frustrated by the inconsistencies and lack of quality in the existing service. Making Workers Forum she observed that human relationships cannot work without their fictions such as the one provided by the luminescent beep and the machine seems not to function properly without its precarious human prosthesis.

Geta Brătescu video work The Line [2014], made in collaboration with Stefan Sava, came out of her multifaceted thinking on drawing. The camera focuses on her hands as she sketches in her drawing book, the viewer witnessing moments of self-inquiry, discovery, and deviation. The lines make up timeless, abstract and, dynamic forms that Bratescu has worked with all her life. Ad Minoliti creates extensive multimedia spaces in her paintings and sculptures inspired by cyborgs, geometry and abstraction, genderless identities, a sci-fi inspired queer feminist vision, and vintage pornographic magazines. Her humorous personal utopias take place in these spaces shifting the memory of modernist utopias and proposes imaginative ways to transgress our algorithmically fed perception.

Pi Artworks London is open Tuesday – Friday, 10:00 – 18:00 and Saturdays, 11:00 – 18:00. For information, interviews and images, please contact Neil Jefferies: nj@piartworks.com / +44 207 637 8403

facebook.com/events/1087524901367902/#

VIDEO NIGHT - SPACE collection Lüttich

VIDEO NIGHT supported by SPACE Collection
September 3, 2016 // 9pm

SPACE Collection
Féronstrée 116
4000 Lüttich
Belgium

Organized by Mathilde Ganancia and Charlotte Lagro with the support of SPACE Collection, VIDEO NIGHT reunites eight international artists for an evening of art videos.

Each of them explore how the singular can relate to the enormous : from the individual facing massive institutions to massive immersions mesmerizing the individual.

Using animated video, performative fiction, documented performance and revisited interview, the artists slip into various roles while establishing new forms of introspections.

Avec / with :
One Of Twelve (NY)
Sophia Cleary (LA)
Arnaud Dezoteux (Paris)
Virgile Fraisse (Paris)
Gregory Kalliche (NY)
Jacques Lizène (Liège)
Kianoosh Motallebi (Bxl)
Pilvi Takala (Berlin)

Image: theothersideofthemuffledwall (Gregory Kalliche)

+++ Trailer:
vimeo.com/179640462

facebook.com/events/282265922133377/ 

DAVOR Freiluftkino Weißensee - Real Snow White

DAVOR
Freiluftbühne Weißensee
Große Seestraße 9, 13086 Berlin

Real Snow White, 2009, Video, Farbe, Ton, 9:15 min
Fr. 22.7.2016, 21:30 Uhr/ Do. 4.8.2016, 21:15 Uhr/ Sa. 13.8.2016, 21 Uhr

DAVOR ist eine Programmreihe künstlerischer Filme im Freiluftkino Weißensee. Vor den eigentlichen Hauptfilm gesetzt, ohne inhaltlichen Bezug dazu, mit unvorhersehbaren Effekten. Mit Displacing Motion, Mutual Red und Responding Environs von Silva Agostini; You Kiss By The Book von Nina Hoffmann; Durchzug und Mauer von Konrad Mühe; Real Snow White von Pilvi Takala; Gegen den Strich von Eva Vuillemin und Die Rechte des Gehsteig von Anna Witt, ausgewählt von Silke Baumann & Akiko Bernhöft.

Am Freitag, dem 26.8., gibt es den großen Davor–Abend, an dem alle Beiträge der Davor-Reihe und andere künstlerische Arbeiten in einem Programm gezeigt werden!

freilichtbuehne-weissensee.de/kurzfilmreihe-davor/

Kunsthal Aarhus - Pilvi Takala

Exhibition period: 22 June-21 August 2016
Opening: 22 June

Kunsthal Aarhus presents an exhibition by the Finish artist Pilvi Takala.

Artist Pilvi Takala provides an overview of her work of the last ten years in her first solo exhibition in Denmark. The exhibition consists of 8 single channel video works, their costumes, and the public work Lost Pigeons.

Takala’s rich performative visual art practice takes place mostly at moments where she blends into social and public environments. In the spaces and places of offices, class rooms, amusement parks and public streets, her form of disguise and infiltration reveals the direct operation of many of the systems she finds herself in.

From a marketing office in Finland, to a shopping mall in The Netherlands and a boarding school in the US, the project of infiltration is often employed to offer practical stages of public research. Takala investigates these environments in a humorous way, and through her challenges Takala plays with our expectations, our prejudism and our notion of what is normal behavior within these shared places. The result mostly comes to us in the form of narrative video, rather than us witnessing the direct movements. It alludes to a form of extreme observation of how these things actually work and what they tell us of our own position in a larger framework of communities and life. A clear example of Takala’s work and tactics is The Trainee (2008) where she as an artist were part of a month-long traineeship at Deloitte in Helsinki. Embedded within the company, she slowly changed her concentration of the job from ‘working’ into ‘thinking’. Obviously raising attention within the office to her – at first sight – passive activity, her colleagues confronted her directly on her lack of productivity. It challenged the very basic need and value of work in a direct office landscape, showing cracks internally within such an environment in parallel to trying to develop artistic responses to such systems.

kunsthalaarhus.dk/en/programme#overlay=en/programmes/pilvi-takala

Detail ist alles - Kunsthalle Mainz

Kunsthalle Mainz
Am Zollhafen 3 - 5
55118 Mainz
Germany

Detail ist alles

Vito Acconci / Francis Alÿs / Samson Kambalu / Jiří Kovanda / Klara Lidén / Ahmet Öğüt / Roman Ondak / Neša Paripović / Pilvi Takala

24th June – 16th October 2016
Opening: Thursday, June 23rd, 2016 at 7pm

Bucharest Biennale 7

The BUCHAREST BIENNALE continues to build a strong partnership between Bucharest — a geocultural space where the political is reflected in all aspects of life—and the rest of the World. In transcending specific geographical, historical, or political frameworks, it connects to a broader complexity, namely the one of “resistance” within the quotidian realm.

As a biannual cultural event, BB’s temporary structure allows a deconstruction of the systems supporting and underlying what has been called the “experience economy”. The Bucharest Biennale goes beyond merely orchestrating memorable “events” that aim for prescribed notions of customizable transformation, which are characteristic of this economic model and importantly reflected in the global biennial format as well. Instead, the Biennale offers a platform to analyse, and potentially redirect, current social, political and economic imaginaries. It intends to make visible the power structures supporting such spheres of control, addressing the ways in which they are organized and coordinated, as well as implemented across broad segments of society.

On BB7:

What are we building down there?

- What is the difference between a fairy tale in the West and a fairy tale in the East?

- A fairy tale in the West starts with the words “Once upon a time there was…”
A fairy tale in the East starts with the words “Once upon a time there will be…”*

Once upon a time there will be a Bucharest that positions itself as a model city for
privatization processes worldwide…

In order to grasp this fairy tale-proposition, we first need to go back in time.

continue reading

List of BB7 participating artists:

Merve Bedir (TR)
Bors & Ritiu (RO)
Nanna Debois-Buhl (DK)
Burak Delier (TR)
Andrea Faciu (RO)
Brendan Fernandes (CA)
Allard van Hoorn (NL)
Adelita Husni-Bey (IT)
Tuomas A. Laitinen (FI)
Lehman Brothers (DK)
Tamás Kaszás (HU)
Metahaven (NL)
Rie Nakajima (JP)
SPEEDISM (BE)
Nasan Tur (DE)
Jaro Varga (SK)
Vermeir & Heiremans (BE)
Visible Solutions LLC (ES)
Pilvi Takala (FI)
Andrew Norman Wilson (US)

www.bucharestbiennale.org

Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
April 8 – May 15, 2016

Pilvi Takala provides a major overview of her work of the last ten years in her first solo exhibition in Scotland.

Takala is known for her video works that investigate different social situations and human behaviour. Her rich performative visual art practice takes place mostly where she blends into environments that seemingly have little to do with an artistic reality. From communities of poker players in Thailand, teahouses in Turkey and dance events in Estonia, to a shopping mall in The Netherlands and a boarding school in the US, disguise and infiltration are employed to offer practical stages of public research and response.

One clear example of her tactics as an artist is The Trainee – her month-long project in partnership with Deloitte Helsinki in 2008. With only a few people knowing the true nature of the project, the artist (posing initially as a normalseeming marketing trainee) began to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually shifting her concentration of the job from working to thinking, she started to raise attention within the office of her – at first sight – passive activity. Her traineeship challenged the very basic value of work in a direct office landscape, showing cracks internally within such an environment in parallel to trying to develop artistic responses to such systems. The Trainee will be included in the exhibition at CCA amongst a range of works such as Real Snow White which highlights the strict discipline of Disneyland when Takala – posing as a fan and dressed as Snow White – is banned from entering the park by security; The Angels, where the artist disguises herself as a shop assistant and performs bonafide acts of kindness; Easy Rider, a film made secretly on public transport as a man borrows clothes from a stranger and Event on Garnethill, a publication of a performance that Takala developed while studying at Glasgow School of Art in 2004 in which she dressed up in a local school uniform and spent time on the streets among the school pupils.

Pilvi Takala said: “I consider Garnethill the birthplace of my practice and showing the work that grew out of that simple gesture in CCA now is extremely meaningful. The way I use my own body as a tool for research has evolved in many ways, but it’s always as crucial to choose the right way to dress for each situation.”

Also included in CCA are two of Takala’s award-winning works. Broad Sense focusses on an intervention in the European Parliament which saw questions about dress codes submitted to each member state and the resulting responses printed on nineteen different t-shirts worn by Takala on visits to the Parliament over the course of three days. Broad Sense was awarded the first prize of Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2011.

In 2013, Takala won the Emdash Award, aimed towards production of a new work for Frieze Art Fair, and invited a group of local children to spend her award. They were free to spend the money any way they wanted, and choose how they would formulate decisions as a group. In the resulting film, The Committee, the children explain how they chose to spend the £7,000 prize money and discuss the values which guided their decisions.

CCA Curator Remco de Blaaij said: “Pilvi Takala’s works employ the simple tactics of starting conversations in a way that confronts micro realities. European security, corporate rules and local customs are all challenged to perform what might be expected. What unfolds, however, is a very carefully constructed breakdown of barriers, in order to reveal their actual significance and meaning in our current societies and lives.”

Programmed as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
A series of events will accompany this exhibition and will be announced soon.

contemporaryartdaily.com/2016/05/pilvi-takala-at-centre-for-contemporary-arts

Double Act: Art and Comedy at the Bluecoat

 

Double Act: Art and Comedy explores how comedy helps us to shape meaning and negotiate the complexities of everyday life.

Humour is a way of binding people together: providing consolation, a sense of shared experience and a powerful weapon of resistance. But, what we find funny can also be cruel, hateful, establishing symbolic boundaries that divide people into distinct groups, setting those with power against those without.

The show draws together artists from diverse cultural and political contexts, each sharing an interest in humour as a resource to animate their art practice and to connect with an audience.

The exhibition curators, David Campbell and Mark Durden, are founding members of the artists’ group Common Culture and are currently studio holders at Bluecoat. This project stems from explorations in their own work of the comedic impulse within contemporary British culture. As the title suggests, the exhibition itself is a ‘double act’ and will be held at two venues, Bluecoat and MAC, Belfast (6 May - 31 Jul 2016), each featuring different works.

Programmed in association with The MAC, Belfast.

Artists: Bill Woodrow // Mel Brimfield // Peter Land // Common Culture // Bank // Gemma Marmalade // Jo Spence and Terry Dennett // Sarah Lucas // Maurice Doherty // Alex Bag // Thomas Geiger // David Sherry // Erica Eyres // Peter Finnemore // Kara Hearn // Pilvi Takala

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 - Sun, 19 Jun 2016
10.00 AM - 6.00 PM Free entry

Fri 8 Apr Exhibition Launch 



for more info and related events please visit: thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/exhibitions/3355

Infinite Next

May 7 - June 19, 2016
Infinite Next
The Living Art Museum
Völvufell 13-21
111 Reykjavík
Iceland

Infinite Next is a group exhibition of works by Anna Líndal, Amy Howden-Chapman, Bjarki Bragason, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson, Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir and Pilvi Takala.

Inifinity is limitless, there is endless space, size or context and it is impossible to measure or view it in entirety.

Works in the exhibition deal in different ways with systems which all societies struggle with; late-capitalism, ecosystems in degradation, human experiments to alter the environment, knowledge production, manifestations and the effects of humans on the environment. Since the beginning of agriculture and with the industrial revolution, which took place between 1760 and 1820-40, humans have become a geological force. Human activity began to mark deeper footprints on the planet and cause changes to natural processes. Today the effects are apparent in climate change, which is hard to quantify as an entirety, instead it appears as fragments in all things, as an imbalance in bio systems, droughts or rain, as changes in circumstances and future prospects of all species. Recently in world history, culture has been able to produce products that continue to have an impact dozens of millennia after the production or their use occurred.

Thus, the residue of atomic bombs will spread and glaciers melt, thousands of years after the plug has been pulled on all the world’s factories. The geological time-frame has overlapped with the human time-frame for the first time. Ahead are endless connections between processes that upon first sight are not directly related; communities of the past and the present infiltrate the future, which individuals try to imagine and locate themselves within, while political power systems struggle to form common goals.

www.nylo.is/events/infinite-next

ARTISTS’ CINEMA: Pilvi Takala at MSU

Gorgona Hall, Friday, April 15th 2016, 7 PM. Entrance is free.

Presentation of artworks by Pilvi Takala in the program ARTISTS’ CINEMA is performed in collaboratin with the project PERFORMIG THE MUSEUM.

After presentation of artworks done by Jasmina Cibic, MSU Zagreb is bringing another guest artist - Pilvi Takala. Artworks and film production of this artis from Finland is based on research of different social structures in different cultural contexts. She takes on the position of a director and the viewer become the real actor in her stories. By analyzing social topics and situations such as dreams coming true and money approation, she focuses our attention on disruption of borders and rules to show the real social situations.

Program:

Real Snow White (2009), 9:15 min / Players (2010), 7:50 min / Drive With Care (2013), 13 min /

The Committee (2015) 15 min / Workers Forum (2015), 6:23 min

Total: 51 min

ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a screening program at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb established in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program presents recent works of film/video outside the context of production of entertainment and spectacle as well as introducing historical perspectives and developments. It completes the programming of the Museum and complement the presentation of this hybrid form. It is aimed to intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way it will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving images.

Curated by: Branka Benčić, independent curator

Project manager: Tihomir Milovac, senior curator MSU

www.msu.hr/#/en/20963/111690/0/1/

Pilvi Takala at CCA Glasgow

Fri 8 April – Sun 15 May 2016

Centre for Contemporary Arts
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G2 3JD
United Kingdom

Artist Pilvi Takala provides an overview of her work of the last ten years in her first solo exhibition in Scotland.

Takala’s rich performative visual art practice takes place mostly at moments where she blends into environments that seemingly have little to do with an artistic reality. In the spaces and places of offices, class rooms, amusement parks and public streets, her form of disguise and infiltration reveals the direct operation of many of the systems she finds herself in.

From communities of poker players in Thailand and a marketing office in Finland, to a shopping mall in The Netherlands and a boarding school in the US, the project of infiltration is often employed to offer practical stages of public research. This research mostly comes to us in the form of documentation, rather than us witnessing the direct movements. It alludes to a form of extreme observation of how these things actually work and what they tell us of our own position in a larger framework of communities and life. A clear example of her tactics as an artist is her month-long traineeship at Deloitte in Helsinki in 2008. Embedded within the company, she slowly changed her concentration of the job from ‘working’ into ‘thinking’. Obviously raising attention within the office to her – at first sight – passive activity, her colleagues confronted her directly on her lack of productivity. It challenged the very basic need and value of work in a direct office landscape, showing cracks internally within such an environment in parallel to trying to develop artistic responses to such systems.

For the show at CCA, Takala will build upon her archive and focus on revisiting a work she developed in 2004 in Garnethill that signalled a way of working in a specific Glasgow community.

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Programmed as part of Glasgow International Festival.

A series of events will accompany this exhibition and will be announced soon.

Tue-Sat: 11am-6pm // Sun: 12noon-6pm // Free
During GI festival only, the exhibition will be open on Monday, 11am – 6pm (11, 18 & 25 April).

www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/56c5e4de694f20161d000002

Four video-performances

Pilvi Takala
Four video-performances
23.03 — 17.04.16
Artist’s talk and screening: March 22, 2016, at 6:30 pm
Looped screening 23.03 – 17.04.2016
Cinema Dynamo, 4th floor of the Centre d'Art Contemporain. Free entrance.

The Cinema Dynamo presents four video works by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala (b. 1981, Helsinki).
In her work, Takala trespasses smaller microcosms, using a hidden camera to document a single, subtle act of transgression of established social conduct. In doing so, she unsettles the unspoken rules of various ambiguous societies

Real Snow White, 2009, 9.15 min

The absurd logic of the “real character” and the extreme discipline of Disneyland become apparent when a real fan of Disney’s Snow White is banned from entering the park in a Snow White costume.

The Trainee, 2008, 14 min

To realize The Trainee, the artist worked for a month undercover as trainee in the marketing department of the multinational Deloitte. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe normal to the object of avoidance and speculation. If apparent activity and browsing Facebook during working hours belong to the acceptable behavioural patterns of a work community, sitting in front of an empty desk, thinking, threatens the peace of the community. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways of looking after the odd member in a group.

Players, 2010, 7.50 min

Players portrays a community of six poker professionals who live among a larger poker community in Bangkok. Playing poker is more just a way to make money than a passion for them, but the rules that govern their community follow the logic of the game. The systematic and analyzed way these poker players look at everyday life may seem absurd, but this shock might be more over their ignoring their original society than over the way they have built their own.

Drive With Care, 2013, 12.54 min

Based on Takala's time spent undercover as a teacher in an elite boarding school in the USA, Drive With Care explores people's strategies for survival and how faculty members and their families negotiate their own space within the institution. The piece is about finding loopholes - places to breathe - while being careful not to violate shared rules.


Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève
Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10,
1205 Genève
P.O. Box 121, 1211 Genève 8
www.centre.ch/en/pilvi-takala-four-video-performances

Workers Forum in Artforum

Pilvi Takala
YAMA
Asmalı Mescit Mh., Meşrutiyet Cd No:93
January 30–March 27

When the sun sets in Istanbul, the architectural hodgepodge of Beyoğlu—the main cultural and (especially) nightlife artery of the city—comes alive with palpably garish, universally dramatic lighting on its fin-de-siѐcle and post-’80s facades alike. The source of this visual din, an uninterrupted series of light-accessory shops, proceeds uphill, culminating in a gigantic LED panel atop the Marmara Pera hotel that serves as a screen for the nonprofit art space YAMA. Established by Sylvia Kouvali (the founder of Rodeo Gallery) with support from Kağan Gürsel (the hotel’s owner), YAMA—which means “patch” in Turkish—has in the past “patched in” works by the likes of Claire Fontaine, Wael Shawky, and Jordan Wolfson to the fabled Istanbul skyline; now it has become the sight/site of Pilvi Takala’s Workers Forum, 2015.

Workers Forum, in its various incarnations, showcases various messages collected from an online support message board for the employees of a microlabor platform—in this case the US-based service known as Invisible Girlfriend/Boyfriend, which sends its customers SMS messages from imaginary partners. The negligible pay, Takala admits as a veteran employee, leaves no doubt that the workers—often addictively—carry on for pleasure. While there are strict virtual boundaries to intimacy with customers, messages on the forum evince a bizarre community in the making: “I am proud of us,” writes a certain “Garish,” while “Jesse” complains: “People are not convinced that we are real.” Despite perhaps failing to create a semblance of reality, these fictions of affection are fraught with competition: “Ebony,” an employee, complains that “the new ones do not bother to play their parts” and prompts a collective call among other experienced employees to oust the newbies without proper work ethics. The conspicuous and decidedly benevolent desire to serve better and spread kindness for almost no pay, a comical allegory of good government, stands in silent but scathing contrast to the state corruption and police violence that Istanbul harbors.

artforum.com/picks/section=eu#Istanbul

Hacking Habitat

Hacking Habitat 
Art of Control
26th February - 6th June 2016

Grand Opening Hacking Habitat

We are pleased to remind you about the opening of HACKING HABITAT. Art of Control, on friday the 26th from 5.00 pm until 10.00 pm in the former prison at Wolvenplein in Utrecht. Attendance is personal and invite only.


About Hacking Habitat

Discover in HACKING HABITAT how systems are holding us hostage. High-tech systems are taking increasing control of our lives. Security cameras monitor our moves, Google steers what we do online with incomprehensible algorithms and we are having a collective love affair with our smart phones. The good news is: we’re taking control back into our own hands. The international art exhibition HACKING HABITAT will open on February 26th in a former prison, the perfect place to experience what control feels like. Socially engaged and critical, but also humorous and optimistic. More than eighty internationally acclaimed artists show us the power of high-tech networks as well as how we can fight back. How do we win our world back from institutions and systems? How do we find the right balance between technology and humanity?

In short: how do we hack our habitat? With Forensic Architecture (UK), Joseph Beuys (DE), Melanie Bonajo (NL), James Bridle (UK), Felix Burger (DE), Centre for Political Beauty (DE), Johan Grimonprez (BE), Susan Hiller (USA), Samson Kambalu (MW), William Kentridge (SA), Laura Kurgan (USA), Cristina Lucas (ESP), Metahaven (NL), Pedro Reyes (MX), Fernando Sanchez Castillo (ESP), Stanza (UK), Timo Arnall (NO), Susan Hiller (USA) and many others.



www.hackinghabitat.com

Workers Forum

 

Workers Forum - Pilvi Takala @ YAMA***

30/01- 27/03/2016
Everyday from sunset to sunrise

The Marmara Pera rooftop
Aşmalı Mescit Mahallesi
Meşrutiyet Caddesi No:93
34430 İstanbul

Opening:
Lobby Talks with YAMA #1
Pilvi Takala in conversation with Özge Ersoy
19:00 pm at the lobby of Hotel Buyuk Londra

Human relationships seem to be more and more constructed on texts, applications, instant messages, and notifications. A beep comes with a luminescent screen reflected to face, changing its regular expression to a smile, a surprise, a curiosity, an engagement. Continuous beeps indicate a continuous desire to be in touch with the world and being desired in return. In the space of the messages, all is under control.

Each one of us is involved with protocols of care and affirmation to a certain extent through likes, shares and retweets. The algorithms measure proximity and match profiles. The luminescent beep has become heavy with implications and sometimes it implicates a fiction to prove the care that has become a norm without content in today's society. No, you cannot be happy on your own.  However, you can be a user of applications where you can create your friend profiles. An imaginary friend with a short term memory can text messages of care without content when the affirmative beep is needed in family and social circles. Sometimes it is just good enough to imagine the person on the other side. An algorithm only or an algorithm within which a human is hidden? It is the latter in most cases.

The idea for Workers Forum came from Takala’s experience as a micro-tasker in the United States for a service where the users pay for having a pretending girlfriend or boyfriend texting them. Through a crowd sourcing platform she responded to the task "Write a text message that is positive, engaging and convincingly written in the voice of someone texting a significant other.” Takala was fascinated by the potential in the fictional space created in the text message exchange, but like many of the other workers, she was frustrated by the inconsistencies and lack of quality in the existing service.

The crowdsourcing systems like Amazon's Mechanical Turk supports freelancing networks built on  micro-labouring cycles of individuals who want to turn their free time into capital without further responsibilities. When there is no work place to go to, it generates a symbolic and precarious usefulness, efficiency and achievement below the threshold of a proper compensation. The principle bringing the man and the machine together to produce continues to evolve since the system requires many micro-tasks that cannot be automated. These micro-tasks can be shared by different people without knowing each other when what they need to do is just to finish a task on their own and get another one.

The video enacts a situation when the workers of such a micro-labour platform repeating protocols of care start to talk with each other in another online gathering. During this meta conversation one asks “How are you handling conversations that diverge into reality?” and continues “about how we get paid for doing this etc?” The other answers “Discussing the job is breaking character.” Workers Forum creates an interface to discuss the online protocols of care that are stripped of memory and content alongside the unconnected micro-labouring cycles that make their algorithm function.

The luminescent beep is a fictional space that is needed to start a conversation. 'I love you' is the only answer the automated Gmail fed by 'deep learning' system repeats in the face of complicated e-mails. As human relationships cannot work without their prosthetic fictions, the machine seems not be functioning properly without its precarious human prosthesis.


* On the rooftop of The Marmara Pera Hotel, YAMA is a screen open to anyone who takes notice of it in the night. From its first day, it has hosted various forms of non profit contemporary art production. To find out more about YAMA visit the website yama-istanbul.tumblr.com


Thanks to: Seda Ateş, Özge Ersoy, Gözde Filinta, Barış Öktem, Hasan Özgür Top 

Click here to reach the event page.

CONDO - CARLOS/ISHIKAWA

16 January – 13 February 2016

Condo is a collaborative exhibition by 24 galleries across 8 London spaces. Carlos/Ishikawa will host these presentations:

Carlos/Ishikawa — Clothes by Darja Bajagić, Ed Fornieles, Eloise Hawser, Helen Marten & Magali Reus, Jack Lavender, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Lloyd Corporation, Marie Angeletti, Oscar Murillo, Pilvi Takala, Puppies Puppies, Stuart Middleton, Victoria Colmegna, Richard Sides
Essex Street (New York) — Jason Loebs, Fred Lonidier
Freymond-Guth (Zürich) — Megan Francis Sullivan
Mathew (New York/Berlin) — Than Hussein Clark

Unit 4, 88 Mile End Road
London E1 4UN
www.carlosishikawa.com
+44 (0) 20 7001 1744
www.condocomplex.org