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
