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
