13-16 november 2025
PILVI TAKALA
VAFT 2025 jury
Biography
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) is one of the best-known and successful videoartists of her generation, and her works have been exhibited internationally in, for example, MoMa PS1, New Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta as well as Istanbul and Venice biennals. Takala's video works are based on performative interventions in which she explores specific communities to focus on societal structures to question the normative rules of our behaviors and truths in different contexts. Takala proves that often the hidden rules of a specific social situation are revealed only by disruption.
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CURATORIAL STATEMENT
This year’s festival embraces curiosity as a practice. Whether through the excavation of archives, the intimate exchange of letters, patient observation, or the animation of utopias, these works move toward uncertainty with intention. Across five screenings and four thematic groupings, the program reconfigures relationships to place, memory, and to each other.
Site of Conflict gathers films that navigate contested spaces—geographical, institutional, and historical—where power is not just exercised but felt. These works offer means to excavate, inhabit, and reimagine spaces shaped by rupture.
Gaps, or; Reproducing Exclusion, a longer work screened on its own, adds to this theme by zooming into an art school as a case study of how seemingly progressive policy can serve as both mask and mechanism for marginalization.
Communal Values asks how we live together—and at what cost. From daily labor to inherited beliefs, from ecological entanglements to the abstraction of value, these works explore systems defining worth and participation. They offer both critique and care, revealing community—as well as value—as constantly negotiated.
Memory Traces features films that reflect on how memories are formed, fractured, and reimagined. Through personal storytelling, sensory speculation, archival recovery, and silence, these works explore memory not as a static record but as a living, shifting terrain. They remind us that to remember is also to imagine—to offer alternative endings, to hold space for what is unspoken, and to embrace the uncertainty inherent in tracing the past.
Elemental Transformations explores the alchemy of change as it unfolds across geological, biological, and technological registers. In these films, elemental forces appear as both metaphors and realities that give shape, offer guidance and console. These works imagine worlds beyond human-centered narratives—making space for transformations that sustain us.