
Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker (2019) and Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) were selected for the international competition of Videoex, Switzerland’s largest festival dedicated to experimental film and video, held in Zürich from May 25 to June 2.
The Stroker is included in the competition screening “Me and You”, screened on Monday, May 27, at 17:45, and on Thursday, May 30, at 17:45.
The Stroker is based on Takala’s two week-long intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. 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.
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) lives and works 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. Her work has been shown in MoMA PS1 and New Museum, Kiasma, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta 11, Witte de With, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial. Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.
Flame is included in the competition screening “Ghosts”, screened on Wednesday, May 29, at 17:45, and on Thursday, May 30, at 14:00.
Flame is a fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. He lives and works in Helsinki. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses random or found materials in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).
Videoex, May 25 – June 2 2019, Zürich, Switzerland
More information: Videoex