How much of ‘real life’ is real? What happens when something true is made by someone fake? When a person dressed as Snow White tries to enter Disneyland? When an artist, dressed as an intern, goes into a multi-national consulting firm to sit at an empty desk and do ‘brain work’?
Breaking Ranks is a mid-career retrospective of Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, showcasing over two decades of her quietly subversive ‘interventionist’ practice. Working across film, installation, and performance, Takala takes the tacit norms that domineer over our day-to-day experiences and renders them transcendently awkward.
Through adopting the guises of myriad characters (princess, intern, security guard, negotiator), Takala interrogates how normalcy is enforced, challenging viewers to reflect on our own roles within the rituals of convention that simultaneously oppress and buttress communities.
Breaking Ranks reveals how both subtle and dramatic interventions can expose the fragility of societal constructs too often mistaken for natural law. Sometimes the simplest gesture can make what we thought was solid start to shake.
This exhibition is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley and is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and The Finnish-Norwegian Culture Institute.