Eija-Liisa Ahtila is one of the most interesting contemporary artists exploring the broadly conceived realm of video art and film. Her video installations exploit both cinematic qualities of a film art work and video art aesthetics.
She turns gallery spaces into the places of “psychological contemplation” as it were. In fact, psychology occupies a special place in her works, which the artist simply refers to as “human dramas” or “stories”. Through the medium of film/video, she shares with the viewer her fantasmatic experiences, thus arriving at an original background for the creation of “real characters in the world of fiction”, in the medium which in itself is emotionless. This description of her work by a British curator from Tate Modern perfectly captures the scope of interests of the Finnish artist.
Since the beginning of the 90s, with her films, video installations and photographs, Ahtila has been telling us the stories of human relations and underlying, often dramatic, emotions. Her films are designed to reflect concrete personalities; film characters act out our everyday experiences as if in a documentary film and not fiction. In this sense, the narrations created by Ahtila are devoid of artificiality, and as such they become a realistic existential film diary.
The reality Ahtila creates in her stories is founded on her own research. What is more, the actors appearing on screen act out scenes that could have been part of their personal experience. These fictitious narrations find their way to the real world being suggestive enough to evoke in the viewer a range of, at times even conflicting, emotions. Simulation actually turns out stronger than reality itself.
The presentation format only intensifies this effect. Realizations interact with gallery space as instead of a typical one-screen projection, the story develops simultaneously on a series of synchronized screens.
In Stary Browar Gallery Ahtila two films had been presented.
“The House’’ is the last episode in a five-part cycle “Love is the treasure” (2002). It depicts situations in which all of the relations collapse. Coexistence of Me/Others becomes impossible. A three-screen installation’s convergence point is a fiction story based on real interviews with a woman suffering from psychosis.
“The Hour of Prayer” (2005) is a very personal picture. The work is an oscillation between the events depicted in subsequent narrations and the artist’s more general reflection on her own life. This autobiographical element enables the inclusion of private experience as a theme or motif in a work of art.
Both works presented in Stary Browar Gallery questioned the role of the postmedia world in shaping our private psychological relations, while at the same time serving as a mirror in which these very relations can be observed.
Exhibition in Stary Browar was the first presentation of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s works in Poland.