BIOGRAPHY
Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland, 1959. Lives in Helsinque
2008 Eija-Liisa Ahtila, K21 Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf;
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Jeu de Paume, Paris
2005 51. Biennale di Venezia;
Ecstasy, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
2002 Real Characters, Invented Worlds, Tate Modern, London; Documenta 11
Selected Bibliography BAL, Mieke,
World Rush_4 (cat.), Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 2003; BONNEFOY, Françoise & BONNEVIE, Claire (eds.),
Eija-Liisa Ahtila (cat.), Jeu de Paume, Paris, Hazan, 2008; DURAND, Régis, “Eija-Liisa Ahtila les morts, la mort, l’espace, le temps”,
Artpress, no. 342, Feburary, 2008, pp. 24-30.
INTERVIEW
Lilian Tone: The two multiplechannel installations that you are showing – The House (2002) and The Hour of Prayer (2005) – are among your most celebrated and well-known works.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila: The House is probably the best known of my works at the moment. It is an installation with three projections and also the last of a five-episode film called
Love Is a Treasure. It tells the story of a woman who falls ill with psychosis. She starts hearing voices, which interfere with her perception of the world and gradually disrupt the time and space around her. She shuts out all images by covering the windows so as to be in the space where the sounds are. For this work I used different special effects to depict the advance of her illness and the collapse of the usual order in her life. I tried to run the realistic settings and logic side by side with the unfamiliar and the imaginary.
The story is based on interviews and discussions with women who have gone through psychosis. The material was developed by using ideas of the loss of linear time and the vanishing of the experience of a complete space. I wanted to explore the breakdown of a coherent world, the collapse of the logic of perception, and the loss of the sense of passing time.
Houses and structured spaces have remained a central topic in my works. A house for me is the definition of a space with a structure – a framed and arranged space. And a space is a setting for words – which are related to distances – and all that has to do with death and with creating meaning.
Lilian Tone: Can you talk about the significance of The Hour of Prayer within your work?
Eija-Liisa Ahtila: The Hour of Prayer is a short tale about attachment and death. It is based on my own life. It tells the story of death entering a house and the process of dealing with grief. These events began in New York during a winter storm in January and ended in Benin, West Africa, eleven months later. It is shown in four simultaneous projections. The intention was to explore the possibilities of disrupting the traditional causal logic as well as the structure and space for perception in screen narrative, while still being able to follow the events. The first part retells a classical tale, in which words and events explain each other and form a temporal progression. As the narrator speaks, words for time are prominent, and images and sounds record the changes of seasons in various landscapes. I used the video material shot at the time of the events in addition to footage of reconstructed situations. An actor / narrator presents the story directly to the camera on a dark expanse of sand, which as the story progresses is revealed to be a set. It ends with the actor walking through the different sets singing to viewers Lhasa’s
Small Song.
The Hour of Prayer is my only autobiographical work to date. I do not like to take the topics of works from my life. That way of working does not correspond to my idea of what art should be and what it can do, which, in the very least, should be to provide an analytical point of view. This piece is based on things that really happened to me during 2004. When towards the end of the year I looked back at what had taken place in my life, it all seemed to form a perfect succession. One event led to another like a string of pearls. It was like someone else’s text, which astonished and fascinated me. A perfect chronology always somehow gets its justification from the absolute: in its presence gravity ceases to exist, things lose their usual meaning and fixed coordinates.
Lilian Tone is a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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