Most of us are aware of the tacit rules that shape our behavior in public. See you are busy when you are at work. Do not familiarize yourself too much with colleagues. Never flance your money. The Finnish artist Pilvi Takala – The star of the Frieze New York performance program – The developed stages of the meetings that exhibit and question these standards. “The limits are still there and they are not good or bad,” she says. “But what they are, how they are negotiated, who decides, the process – all this is interesting.”
We meet with his workspace in Berlin. Despite the discomfort that his work provokes, Takala is funny and frank in person. Often assuming a character or a costume, the artist infiltrated offices, shopping centers and amusement parks, deliberately testing the limits of an acceptable conduct. In “Bag Lady” (2006), she wandered in a shopping center with a transparent plastic bag full of money. For “The Stroker” (2018), she pretended to be a well-being consultant to improve the well-being of employees by providing “touching services” in a fashionable co-working space. And in “The Stage” (2008), she worked as an intern in Deloitte, spending a month going up in elevators or looking in space – to the great confusion of her colleagues.
Captured on the film, Takala's works have gone from the use of sequences of hidden cameras with reconstructions staged with the actors. Often humorous, they are also excruciating to watch. Does she never feel uncomfortable creating them? “I feel it, but I have a different attitude about it than in real life,” she replies. “These feelings are information on the limits. It's like, oh, it seems really annoying, so it's good. I consider these feelings as advice, as something productive.”
Takala first remembers becoming intrigued by the concept of social pressure “at a very young age”, during visits to a cousin who lived in another part of Finland. Often accompanying her at school, she noticed how her status as a visit student has exempt her from the need to integrate. “I remember it was really fantastic,” she says. “I have not had this group pressure that occurs when you have been stuck with the same class for many years.”
Social expectations would later become at the heart of Takala's disarming art, which often highlights their absurdity. In “The Stage”, her inaction prompted her colleagues to send e-mails concerned to managers on “a girl with a glazed look in the eyes”, or to avoid everything that is because she has not masked her lack of productivity with something more acceptable, as traveling Facebook. A feeling of similar hypocrisy was exposed in “Real Snow White” (2009), when Takala tried to enter Disneyland Paris disguised as a princess, to be blocked by security guards who felt the “real” character too much.
“If I introduce myself (in Disneyland) and people think that I am Snow White, but that I do something out of brand, then chaos is loose, almost as if we are in a dark fantasy,” she said. “When there is perfection, a crack will create a total disaster.”
Finding these cracks is not always easy, but that's how Takala prefers it. “If something is so forbidden that everyone knows that we don't want that, it's not interesting,” she said. “But I choose to do something that causes a variety of reactions and there is a kind of negotiation. What interests me is how this negotiation becomes more explicit. Sometimes, as in” The Stroker “, it is not verbal.”
In the filmed reconstruction, many employees were physically distancing themselves from it as it reaches out to hit them gently on the shoulder, tortillating or accelerating their rhythm while they pass. But their reactions also refer to uncertainty: was it something with which they should really feel comfortable? In the context of an office filled with plants with meditation rooms and transparent walls, their responses come up against the carefully organized image of well-being that corporate environments like to promote.
“What provoked me in this space is that it is this community created,” explains Takala. “Well-being is one of your performance of being productive. Apparently everything is open and there is no hierarchy, but in fact, there are a lot of hierarchy. There are a lot of expectations.”
But Takala is not only interested in making fun of daily formalities. For “Close Watch”, his presentation for the Finnish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, the artist worked as a goalkeeper in a shopping center for a large Finnish private security company for six months. During work, she saw colleagues doing racist jokes and using excessive force. The experience gave him an overview of the disturbing consequences of a private company exercising control of public space – and the authority granted to people with a minimum of training (Takala herself qualified for the position after having followed a course of four weeks).
“In Finland, the presence of private security has visibly developed in the past 15 years,” she says. “I am always empathized with this work, because it is not as if you were the police, but you are still somehow the joke between the two. But only one goalkeeper has a lot of agency and decision -making power on a member of the public, and if you do something wrong in their opinion, he is not allowed to use force. At the same time, many of them do not have an agency because they did not stay well or paid. ”
It is this tension between authority and helplessness that Takala was interested in exploring. After leaving the job, she invited some of her ex-collections to participate in a filmed theater workshop with actors where they repeated the tense scenarios in de-escalation, such as the management of an individual in a state of drunkenness. Taking up for three days, these sessions also allowed the guards to open up to the way they felt unable to intervene when they witnessed discrimination or fault of other colleagues. The film has resonated beyond the art world, motivating the security society to introduce anti-racism training. However, Takala maintains that his work is not to offer clear solutions.
“I am not saying: let's say this training for everyone and everything will be good,” she explains. “It's more complex. What I want is to be constructive, not only to say that there are problems, because we all know that it is an extremely problematic industry. It was a question of asking what these problems were, how they affect the person alone and which agency has the only goalkeeper. ”
Recently, Takala has paid its attention from private national security to national security. “The Pin”, his new work commissioned by Frieze and High Line Art, is vaguely inspired by his experience by participating in a Finnish National Defense course. Towards the end of our conversation, she speaks passionately about her opposition to the arms of Finland with Israel, citing the ongoing bombing of Gaza. Military themes, she says, are something with which she hopes to engage in future exhibitions. “Having participated in this course, I may have a little more language for that now,” she thinks. “But it always looks like the work of a certain type of older man to talk about it. There are always all these limits and old hierarchies that appear, even if you have the impression that society has changed.”
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