The exhibition Breaking Ranks is a mid-career retrospective of Finnish artist Pilvi Takala at Kunsthall Trondheim. It showcases 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.
About Pilvi Takala
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) is a Finnish multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki and Berlin. Her artistic practice often tackles power and questions social and societal structures through performative acts. With her work Close Watch, where she worked as a security guard in a shopping mall for six months, she represented Finland in the 59th Venice Biennale held in 2022. Breaking Ranks is Takala’s third solo exhibition in Norway, the first of which was You Can’t Do What You Can’t Imagine at the Finnish-Norwegian Culture Institute in 2010.
Read more about the exhibition on Kunsthall Trondheims website.
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This exhibition is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley and is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and the Finnish-Norwegian Culture Institute.