The Trainee
Installation, 2008
The Trainee has been produced in a collaboration with Deloitte and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. In order to realize the project, the artist was working for a month as a trainee „Johanna Takala” in the marketing departement of Deloitte where only few people knew the true nature of the project.
During the month long intervention an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe normal to the object of avoidance and speculation. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways of looking after the odd member in a group. Sincere interest and bewildered amusement is juxtaposed with demands directed at the superior regarding the strangely behaving worker.
We see the trainee sitting at her workstation in the consults’ open plan office space or in the tax department library all day doing nothing. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable and force the colleagues to search for solutions and come up with explanations for the situation. (P.T.)
Downshifting? To be honest the thought of downshifting scares me, moving away from the city feels like an impossible idea. I wouldn’t want to „quit the game” either, but maybe I already play the game a bit differently than most of us. As an artist I only produce something when I personally feel it’s absolutely necessary and urgent, so the initiative doesn’t come from outside and I feel like I can take part in the game in my own terms.
Artist's Bio:
Pilvi Takala was born in 1981 in Helsinki, lives and works in Amsterdam. She has completed BFA in 2005 as well as MFA in 2006 in the Academy of Fine Arts (Helsinki).
Starting from year 2006 she is having her solo exhibitions, in 2011 she had her exhibition Flip Side in Kunsthalle Lissabon and Sidelines Sørlandets in Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway. In 2012 she had „Broad Sense” exposed in Forum Box/Mediabox in Helsinki, as well as „Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in” in Kunsthalle Erfurti n Germany. The same year she had an exhibition „Suggested Value” in Künstlerhaus Bremen.
She has recieved several prizes: in 2011 Prix de Rome Visual Arts 1st Prize, NL, in 2011 Stuttgart Film Winter, Norman Prize for Best Short Film, in 2010 Kettupäivät Festival, Best Experimental Film, in 2007 Tampere Art Film Festival 1st Prize. (A.V.)