The Body at Work. Laborious Gestures, Awkwardness and Hostage Spectatorship
Using her own body and presence as a research tool, Artist Pilvi Takala places herself in awkward, uncomfortable but constructive places to investigate social situations and human behavior.
In this screening-presentation, she will look at the creative process behind her narrative videos that emerge from her experiments with others. From a community of poker players in Thailand, a corporation office in the Finland to a boarding school and a text message service in the US, we will follow her infiltration and disguised activities in work settings, witnessing how small but subtle infractions can disrupt people’s sense of purpose and seriously threat social order.
Following the screening and presentation, Pilvi Takala will be in conversation with Mathilde Walker-Billaud.
This event is co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, in connection with the panel-discussion on Monday October 24th: The Right of Refusal.
What You Get Is What You See: A Series On Spectatorship
In What You Get Is What You See, Mathilde Walker-Billaud invites artists, filmmakers and writers to show us how to become more active, more engaged–and perhaps better–spectators. The speakers share their experiences and personal observations as audience members, viewers, readers, watchers, listeners of visual and performance arts, radio, TV, graphic design, cinema and Internet. Through their trained gaze and skilled sensitivity, they disturb and displace our perception of contemporary culture and expose spectatorship as an everyday dynamic act.
Pilvi Takala (born 1981 in Helsinki, Finland) lives and works in Berlin. Her recent solo exhibitions include CCA Glasgow, Kunsthal Aarhus and Tartu Art Museum. Her work has been shown in Manifesta 11, MoMA PS1 and New Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Fransisco; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Kunsthalle Basel; De Hallen Haarlem; Wiels, Brussels; 4th Moscow Biennial; Witte de With, Rotterdam; 7th and 4th Bucharest Biennial; 5th Berlin Biennial; and the 9th Istanbul Biennial.
