Eija-Liisa Ahtila

The importance of the individual visitor in forming a narrative is also relevant to the video installation work of contemporary Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Her works examine the processes of perception and the ascription of meaning, deconstructing the story and dividing it across the exhibition space. Her work since1990 has been more deeply concerned with themes surrounding ‘individual identity and the limit of the self and body in relation to the other.’[1] According to Ahtila, what interests her in films and photos is above all the story. Her stories are based on interviews and research transposed into material for the imagination during her scriptwriting process. The impossibilities generated by the imagination are seamlessly incorporated into realistic settings, creating contrast between the extraordinary and the everyday. She calls her films “human dramas” dealing with human relationships, sexuality, the difficulty of communication, individual identity, its formation and disintegration, these ideals are also reflected in the physical design of her installations as she often uses multiple screens adjacent and opposite each other to display her films, making the visitor the final editor of the narrative, they are not simply viewing a film they become part of the process.

This is particularly prevalent in her 1999 installation Consolation Service shown at the Tate Modern. The piece follows the collapse of a marriage fragmented between two adjacent screens, which allow a ‘dichotomized point of view on a single scene while inviting us to see beyond the illusion of fiction.’[1] And also 2001’s The Present which comprises of five films each displayed on a separate monitor, all dealing with the underlying theme of forgiveness. Here the viewer is again faced with the challenge of forming connections between the images they are able to take in across the five screens.

Ahtila’s work is often associated with feminist ideals; her installations are post-structuralist investigations of volatile subjectivity to feminist and post-feminist concerns with subject construction. But like Akerman she describes her work as not being focused on representations of the Girl/Woman stating “At some point I felt that the same thing happened to feminist art as to conceptual art: the issue was kind of written on top or on the surface of the works, they were labeled feminist. Also, during the 1980s a lot of works here were reactions to certain ways of making art or considering art in general. There were some very good works but there was also a need to move on. Instead of just getting characters to talk about feminist issues, I wanted to incorporate feminism deeper in the structure of the works.” [2]Many commentators have described Ahtila’s work using a Deleuzian frame of reference rather than a feminist one, situating her work in an ‘avant-garde tradition of formal experimentation and philosophical exploration.

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Ahtila, like Akerman, explores hyper-realist reality which Jean Baudrillard describes as "The simulation of something which never really existed." Her multi-screen projections seem to be a conscious awaking of auteurist cinematic tradition, rendering it momentarily strange and new while still uncannily familiar. Her work gives no privilege to time over space or sequence over simultaneity; it is in the act of spectatorship where the importance of these dimensions are decided.

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