Pilvi Takala Hides Secrets in Public
The Finnish artist has a mysterious new interactive performance at Frieze New York co-commissioned by High Line Art
The Finnish artist has a mysterious new interactive performance at Frieze New York co-commissioned by High Line Art
Jesi Khadivi In your practice, you intervene in actual social scenarios, sometimes undercover. What is your relationship to the people you encounter in your interventions? Do you conceive of them as an audience or as co-performers or a hybrid of the two?
Pilvi Takala When I have a video in an exhibition, I have chosen what to include. The people who see it are coming to see art and they have certain expectations and distance from those events. But ‘audience’ is not the word I would use for the people who are not knowingly coming to see art. There’s a much more experimental, alive relationship with these people.
When I make my work, my primary concern is the people who are ‘participants.’ I am trying to understand their codes of behaviour and relate to them in a way that brings out something interesting. I’m trying to cause conflict, to have some kind of conversation. I choose to do things in a way that’s a bit off.
There are power relations with the undercover aspect; I’m not revealing everything. But, at the same time, art or not, it’s a real activity in the real world and I have to stand by it ethically — if somebody gets angry, if people really hate it. I can’t rely on the fact that, in the end, it will be revealed to be ‘just art.’
JK Many of your works, like The Trainee (2008), for which you ‘did nothing’ in the Deloitte offices for a month, or The Stroker (2018), where you posed as a wellness consultant providing touching services in a co-working space in London, have a disquieting effect on the people occupying those spaces. You’ve also worked in shopping malls and at Disneyland Paris, all spaces with a crossover between public and private.
PT Many of the early works take place in spaces to which I had access anyway, like shopping malls, and are exactly that mix of private and public. I asked myself why those contexts rubbed me up the wrong way. This led me to explore how behaviour is controlled in such spaces.
When looking at specific workplaces that are new to me, I need time for observation. With The Trainee, I didn’t assume anything about the setting. Of course, I have preconceptions about any kind of office, but I arrived knowing nothing, and just tried to fit in and see what popped up. Then, after two and a half weeks, I decided: ‘I’m going to sit and do nothing.’
At Second Home, the co-working space in London where The Stroker took place, I only did a few days’ site visit initially and arrived at the idea based on that. I didn’t need as long because the space felt more familiar to me. I work a lot in contexts where I feel I can navigate the social scenery to some extent. There has to be an aspect of ‘I could belong here,’ even if I clearly don’t.
JK What is your role as an artist in these spaces: agitator, pest, irritant?
PT All those things! There are official rules, people who have official control, like the security team or the boss. But there are always other kinds of social rules and control that aren’t written anywhere and aren’t so visible. If you play in this gray area and challenge these rules, control appears in different ways. My role is to open up something about how that control functions and what are some of the assumed shared rules and, by doing that, start a conversation about what we actually want.
JK What is your process of determining a context? Is it sparked by any particular personal interest? Or is there a social urgency that you detect in such places?
PT There are different routes, but one big factor is access. For Close Watch (2022), for which I worked as a guard for a private security firm for six months, I was more proactive in creating access, but that was also possible because I had backing, since I was going to represent Finland at the Venice Biennale in 2022. And, for The Trainee, I had backing from the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; Deloitte wanted to work with artists and they were sponsoring the museum, so the curators made the connection. It’s always somewhat through personal relationships, and somebody has to want it.
But, sometimes, I just come across a phenomenon and look into it and see if there’s an access point or anything that I can do with it.
JK Has your project at Frieze and the High Line evolved from previous works or experiences? Is it emerging from longer-form research?
PT As always, it’s going to be some kind of social experiment, but it is live performance — which is not something I’m super comfortable with, even though I’ve done it before. Normally, the performative part of my work is research for me, and then the actual artwork comes later in the form of a video or something else.
This new work takes place at both Frieze and on the High Line. I’ll have actors interacting with passersby and the performance is initiated by that interaction. I can’t share much: it’s not particularly important for people not to know or recognise that it’s a performance, but it’s important that they don’t have a description of what to expect. The audience will be both people expecting a performance and showing up for that, as well as passersby and tourists who don’t know they are being approached by a performer. Recently, I was invited to take part in a Finnish National Defense course run by the military. It’s an elite course for influential people in society that has been running since the 1960s. Having gone through it, I have become part of this select group, which is weird, but also flattering.
For me, participating was, of course, also a great opportunity for artistic research. The course was in the background when I started thinking about what to do in New York. So the performance is inspired by that experience, even if the connections are quite abstract. I look forward to seeing how it’s going to work out in this context. Live performance is definitely exciting because it could work out the way I imagined it would, or in some completely different way I hadn’t envisaged.
Pilvi Takala, The Pin, co-commissioned by High Line Art and Frieze, curated by Taylor Zakarin, associate curator, High Line Art, takes place on 7, 9 and 11 May at Frieze New York 2025 and on the High Line.
This article first appeared in Frieze Week New York magazine with the title ‘The Agitator’.
Further Information
Frieze New York, The Shed, 7 – 11 May, 2025. Tickets are on sale – don’t miss out, buy yours now. Alternatively, become a member to enjoy premier access, exclusive guided tours and more.
A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room will open the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the opportunity to engage with the fair remotely.
Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
Main image: Pilvi Takala, Close Watch, 2022. Courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam.
