Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Since her first public screenings in the nineties, Eija-Liisa Ahtila has become one of the most important video artists on the scene. Her films, which the Finnish artist calls “human dramas,” present characters who find themselves in an unstable environment and are dominated by their emotions. She employs the vocabulary and techniques of wide-screen cinema, as well as various film genres. Ahtila plays with perceptual phenomena and questions the human ability to perceive or reflect on reality. In her latest works she goes beyond traditional explanations for specifically Finnish or northern European states of mind—lack of light, melancholy, insanity—and concentrates instead on challenging the concept of normality and divergence, examining existential, abstract themes such as co-existence and exclusion, childhood and violence, life and death.

Exhibition schedule: Jeu de Paume, Paris, January 22–March 30, 2008 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, May 17–August 17, 2008