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.