Pilvi Takala is an award winning Finnish artist unfolding human interaction through performance and the online interaction. Her work has been exhibited globally, and her intelligent disruptions of social norms have won her the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award in 2013.
Takala's quiet and measured presence matched the tone of the work she unfolded for the us throughout her presentation, showing us work that sensitively untangles the unspoken rules of social convention.
Her work toys with the tension of social interaction, and how culture informs it. In "The Stroker", a piece that took place in Second Home, a London co-working space, she exposes the intimacy of touch, and how disarming small gestures can be to a culture that typically reserves touch for romantic love. Her transit through the building is punctuated by the friendly touch she extends to every person that passes her, met with a range of reactions spanning from confusion and friendliness to nervousness and disdain.
She exposes the rarity of sitting and thinking in her experimental office piece "The Trainee", challenging the boundaries of normative art making and moving somewhere in the liminal space between art, sociology and endurance.
The audience was struck by her articulate and reserved, yet humorous way of speaking, and found that the work reflects the depth and curiosity of Takala, an artist who makes work that empathically examines humans as if she were of another species.
Takala spoke of the significance of the location in which the work takes place. "The Stroker" occurring in an office in London makes a piece informed by boundaries built by British culture and social convention. In "Admirer" her long term interaction with an internet troll, transformed into an interactive work of art, was an interesting display of her own delicate relationship with boundaries; she formed a relationship with an often abusive, unknown person who had access to her identity through her public facing art work, another dance with intimacy and rules, allowing her partner the illusion of control.
Her visit derailed our ideas of what public facing or relational art can be, and in her unassuming, yet unusual happenings she effectively draws attention to the work without having to ask for it.
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