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Pilvi Takala

The Stroker

2019

Video, 15”20, color, sound

English spoken

Courtesy of Carlos/Ishikawa and Helsinki Contemporary


The Stroker is a single-channel video installation based on Takala’s two-week-long

intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young

entrepreneurs and start-ups. During the intervention, Takala posed as a wellness

consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel

Touch, who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services

in the workplace. Nina strolled around Second Home being friendly to everyone,

greeting and lightly touching people as she passed them by. It gets the office talking.

Workers gossip amongst themselves, visibly bonding over their common confusion. 

She was nicknamed “The Stroker”.



The responses of the “touches” varied widely. Most were polite, but there were

those whose body language registered a visible discomfort—perhaps simply due to

the cultural context of this invasion of personal space, or perhaps as a result of the

inner conflict that arises when one does not feel able to truthfully or openly react.

When unable to assert oneself, this kind of embodied negotiation may take the place

of words.



The nuances of movement demonstrate how people negotiate the dilemma of being

mediated bodies under social pressure, and how such responses are controlled by

the tacit conventions governing what is deemed to be “acceptable behaviour”. In the

clear-walled, open-thinking space of The Stroker, we witness a physical negotiation

of boundaries where there seemingly are none.



Artist’s Bio:

Pilvi Takala is an artist living and working between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video

works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific

communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules

and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often

possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption.