Pilvi Takala, Players (2010). Film still
Money Making Strategies That WORK, Pilvi Takala’s new performative lecture which receives its British debut as part of this exhibition, is more accurately defined in the artist’s description of it as a talk informed by the tactics of money-making motivational speakers.
Tickets are a tenner, but anyone left unsatisfied by the promise of being shown the possibilities of getting “anything they want, effortlessly” will be offered a £20 refund.
Budget-risking fare from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts graduate, then, but it’s all entirely in keeping with films in which she variously attends a tourist tea dance in an extravagant ball dress, draws the chagrin of Deloitte employees by spending a workshy day in a lift and is refused entry to Disneyland Paris despite going to the effort of dressing as the Real Snow White.
Takala’s underlying fascination, she confesses, is with wonga: Players stars online poker gamers who move to Bangkok and buy valueless items for fun with their earnings, an idea imitated by the artist in Bag Lady, when she trawls a Berlin shopping centre with a transparent plastic bag full of cash, buying small items and ignoring the aroused suspicions of managers.
Visitors will be asked to put their own reservations to one side in Lost Pigeons, a series of 100 posters for missing birds, each bearing a number viewers can call to connect to a local pigeon-fancier.
Anyone with a curious love of car crash social situations is certain to adore Takala’s excruciating eye for the painfully bizarre. And for those less impressed, the reactions of her unwitting onlookers should raise a modicum of empathy.
- Open Tuesday-Saturday 11am-5.30pm. Admission free.
