Galerija Miroslav Kraljević is proud to present Pilvi Takala’s solo show Outshiners. Besides a selection of the artist’s earlier work, the exhibition presents a new piece The Messengers, produced during the artist’s research and residency at G-MK in Winter 2007.
In her work, Pilvi Takala often uses narrative forms such as video or artist books, which are based on interventions or actions in specific social settings. With subtle interventions the artist creates situations where the unwritten rules and shared truths are revealed, questioned and eventually reinvented. Takala\’s projects often use the visual language of documentation or evidence such as candid camera aesthetics. The situations and settings we encounter in her works are always banal and everyday, something that could easily be experienced by any of us. Even if the work has elements suggesting fiction, the border of fact and fiction often tends to stay blurred and finally, unimportant. By bringing the work very close to real life, Takala tries to make the small miracles more visible, those that seem unreal, but actually are possible. She is interested in looking at the social rules we follow in different situations and finding ways of pushing the limits of our toler ance to create openings, exceptions in everyday life that allow us to see something in a place we thought was empty.
The video Easy Rider brings the short story of a young man in a tram who is asking a bit too much from a stranger. In Wallflower an overdressed girl tries her luck at a dance party for elderly Finnish tourists in Pärnu, a small Estonian health resort town. In The Announcer an elderly lady pushes the limits of customer service at an up-market department store by continuously requesting announcements for interesting-looking men while The Angels is based on a performance in a department store, where an \’angel\’ dressed in the clerk\’s uniform is taking care of the feeling of safety in a suspicious way. Takala\’s artist book Bag Lady is based on a performance which took place again in a mall – Arkaden in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, where the artist went shopping carrying a transparent plastic bag full of money for one week. Behaving like a perfect customer while doing something totally wrong, Bag Lady is both a security threat and a subje ct of protection. Existing in both roles but fitting in neither of them she challenges the pleasant and secure shopping atmosphere of the mall, especially the people responsible for maintaining it. This slight intervention sheds controversial light on the fragility of the social order, where private property in the form of money or product is such a holy cow, that it is under constant intuitive public control. The Messengers is a new project developed during Pilvi Takala\’s residency at G-MK in Zagreb in Winter 2007 that presents a series of mysterious phonecalls to a local newspaper that deliver positive stories about a local celeb. The project deals with the celebrities phenomenon and the the role of the media in transitional Croatian society, the production of belief and the irony behind the contruction of the positive or negative myths.
Curated by Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca
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Pilvi Takala, born in Helsinki 1981, currently lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from Finnish Academy of Fine Arts 2006 (MFA) and will be in residency at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2009. She has had solo exhibitions in Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Turku Art Museum; Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes; Galeria Noua, Bucharest and her work has been shown widely in group exhibitons including 5th Berlin Biennial; 9th Istanbul biennial; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul and Kunsthalle, Helsinki.
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With the support of FRAME – Finnish Fund for Art Exchange
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g-mk | galerija miroslav kraljevic is a non-profit space and platform dedicated to context responsive artistic and intellectual practices.
The Program of G-MK is supported by: City of Zagreb – City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Ministry of Culture – Croatia, INA Ltd.
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For more information on our activites and exhibitions, please visit our website: www.g-mk.hr
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g-mk | galerija miroslav kraljevic
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