Eija-liisa ahtila installation carpets

  • The Annunciation was first shown in Paris early December 2010.
  • Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker, who experiments with narration in her cinematic installations and films.
  • In one of the halls at KIASMA, on six screens that span the length of two rooms, could be seen Ahtila's moving image installation of a fir tree.

    • •

    ALISON BUTLER

    Sometimes we may encounter a fantasy, an
    image or a piece of writing through which we can
    momentarily step inside the particular worlds
    of time and space that [other] beings inhabit.

    These words, spoken by a character in The Annunciation [Marian ilmestys, 2010], encapsulate the spectator’s experience of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s cinematic installations. Encountered in darkened rooms, her work transports us to strange worlds in which the power of the imagination holds as much sway as the laws of nature, in which words, images, colours and sounds govern the shapes of time and space. As this immersive quality is a defining characteristic of both moving images and installation art, it is hardly surprising to find it intensified in screen-based installations. However, in Ahtila’s work it is paradoxically combined with a reflexive aesthetic and a keen critical interest in the conditions of representation, and it is this combination of absorption and criticali

    •

    Eija-Liisa Ahtila

    Eija-Liisa Ahtila (°1959, Finland) is a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker. She has long been considered a mästare of the cinematic installation form.

    Her work fryst vatten conceptually organized around the construction of image, language, narrative, and space, and she has often probed individual identity and the boundaries of the subject in relation to the external world.

    Using the visual language of cinema, Ahtila presents large-scale installations with multiple channel projections on multiple screen constructions. These viewing conditions, with their simultaneously charged vantage points, break the tradition of cinematic perspective and construct an experience of several co-existing times and spaces for being.

    M-Museum Leuven

    The M collection contains more than 58,000 objects, from the Stone Age to the present. The late Gothic, the Renaissance and the 19th century are particularly well represented. M also holds a valuable collection of contemporary art, wit

    •

    Eija-Lissa Ahtila

    The border between private and shared experience is a recurring subject of Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s absorbing fictional dramas. The House (2002), for example, shifts between third- and first-person viewpoints as it traces a woman’s slow unraveling through her daily activities and her increasingly florid imaginings. Where is Where? (2008) examines a real 1950s murder through the words of the perpetrators and the eyes of a contemporary poet obsessed with their motives.

    The starting point for Ahtila’s most recent exhibition was the work of German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and his interest in what he called the Umwelt,or subjective realities, of creatures with different sensoria from our own. Enlarging on Uexküll’s ideas, Ahtila considered whether by moving closer to another’s perspective—however alien to one’s own—one might, if only for an instant, enter into it.

    At the center of t

  • eija-liisa ahtila installation carpets