Human emotions like love, sexuality, jealousy, rage, vulnerability, personal crises, how human behaviour patterns are structured and possible variations within them are central themes in Eija-Liisa Ahtila's work. In the Kunsthalle also includes a survey of the artist's film output in the form of monitor installations, video projections and film screenings.
Press conference: Friday, 14 June, 10.30 a.m.
Opening: Friday, 14 June, from 6 p.m.
The Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila has been making a name for herself
since the late 80s with a complex oeuvre in the field of photography, film
and video works that has influenced a lot of younger artists. Her film
episodes handle visual thought and narrative with characteristic astuteness.
She operates across the whole range of visual culture in the media and her
work creates pictorial worlds that touch upon, and stimulate discussion
about, the operation modes and styles of current film genres like shorts,
commercials and feature films or documentaries. Eija-Liisa Ahtila
interweaves the genres in her photographs, films and videos to form floating
new pictorial worlds that make the familiar seem unknown. Her ³narratives²,
which relate reality, fiction and surreality to each other and establish a
new narrative language, deal with the way in which everyday experiences are
made up. They touch upon questions about the identity of the individual,
about the forms of our life together and the positioning of people in a
media-formed world that is increasingly permeated with fictions and
simulations.
As well as early and very recent photographic work, the exhibition in the
Kunsthalle Zürich also includes a survey of the artist¹s film output in the
form of monitor installations, video projections and film screenings. Among
the selection of video works are: Nature of Things (1987), Me/We, Okay, Gray
(1993), Today (1997), Consolation Service (1999), The Wind (2001) and The
Present (2001).
Human emotions like love, sexuality, jealousy, rage, vulnerability, personal
crises, how human behaviour patterns are structured and possible variations
within them are central themes in Eija-Liisa Ahtila¹s work. Placation or
reconciliation with the insoluble ³human drama² of existence have an
increasingly important part to play here. Her films always start with an
extensive examination of documentary material, which she then carries over
into the fictions of her ³dramas². The development of an independent
pictorial language (which in the more recent work increasingly builds
painterly aspects into the film medium), language (and its ability to create
fictions and deviate from the pictorial information, and in its performative
aspects), unconventional narrative forms and how the audience can experience
her work in time and space are important elements of her extraordinary film
and pictorial worlds. And in their presentation of banal normality, her
works always reveal the fractures, vulnerabilities and abysses of
contemporary identity.
Film, television, the Internet and advertising, in fact the media in general
have a very wide-ranging effect on our experience of self and reality. These
pictorial worlds are a constitutive part of our reality, and they also
intervene in our construction of self, which has to position itself with a
view to ambivalent realities: between private and public images of the
subject, between real experience and fictional identifications. Eija-Liisa
Ahtila works with the conditions of this contemporary visual culture, and
the ways it has of making its effects. She presents her films and videos
both via media channels like television and the cinema, and also in video
installations that are devised especially for each film, creating spaces and
situations in which we plunge into ensembles that are designed down to the
last detail. Her video installations tell stories on multiple narrative
levels that run alongside each other as synchronised or parallel image
tracks: places, people, voices, rhythms change from one film level to
another, creating a non-linear narrative flow. The interplay of all
narrative levels addresses the overtaxing of contemporary perception, the
uncertainty of the subject¹s position and the complexities of experiencing
reality. As a parallel flow of simultaneous projections of several pictorial
planes, and as a discontinuous stream of information, her works compel
viewers to construct their own narrative and to find their own version of a
concept of reality.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila¹s films concern every human being¹s stock of memories.
They are simultaneously personal and universally valid, because their
stories, their events could happen anywhere. Life in cities, schooldays,
home, puberty, sexuality, marriage, relationship and personality crises.
They lay the fragility of standardised normality open to experience. The
banal becomes surreal, normality is alienated. The protagonists of her
³dramas² speak with the voice of a fictitious partner or of their own
alienated self as a conversation partner; they ³play² themselves, comment on
their situation, rehearse the strike action or adopt the voices of their
partners or other members of their family as their own. Over and over again
they appeal to the audience, which should, can or must start to function as
a real reference point for their narratives. Linguistic formulae become
musical rhythms, communication failures lead to distorted interpretations
and role changes. Restrictions imposed by convention and emotional ties are
just as threatening as loneliness. The people in Eija-Liisa Ahtila¹s films
are driven by the heterogeneous aspects of our reality: by life-styles and
role-models that have become insecure, by the obscenity of the ceaseless
publication of the most intimate matters, as happens in the omnipresent
chat-shows, for example, through the worlds of film and advertising, the
flood of news and the fact that the media have intensified the
inseparability of public and private, real and fictitious, banal and
shocking.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila (born in 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland) is showing »The
House« at Dokumenta XI in Kassel. »The House« is a further video
installation based on the film material used in the work she presented in
Zurich, »The Present«. Important solo exhibitions in 2002: KIASMA Museum of
Modern Art, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, who first
appeared in Switzerland in 1998 showing three video installations has won
many distinguished awards, including for example the Vincent van Gogh Award
for Contemporary Art, the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, the
Venice Biennale Recognition Award and the VIPERÂ Festival Video Art Award.
Guided tours: always on Wednesday at 6.30 p.m. 3.7. / 24.7. / 7.8.
(Medea Hoch)
Groups tours are also possible outside opening hours by arrangement.
Tuesday - Friday noon  6 p.m., Saturday/Sunday 11 a.m. 5 p.m., closed
Mondays
Other venues that will be showing Eija-Liisa Ahtila's films:
Eija-Liisa Ahtila has translated the video shown in this exhibition, »The
Present«, into two other formats: 5 video clips lasting for thirty seconds
that are to be shown on television and a cinema version called »Love is a
Treasure«. The television clips will be broadcast in SAT.1 Schweiz¹s
commercial breaks while the exhibition is running. Dates for the art-house
cinema showings cinema will be announced separately.
Catalogue: Eija-Liisa Ahtila »Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations«
Ed.: KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art & Crystal Eye, Helsinki. Essays by
Kaja Silverman, Daniel Birnbaum, Taru Elfving, Kari Yli-Annala. Dt./Fin, 24
8 pages
SYMPOSIUM
VISIONS OF A FUTURE: ART AND ART HISTORY IN CHANGING CONTEXTS
Zurich 16-19 June 2002
International Symposium, organized by the Swiss Institute for Art Research
(SIAR) in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Zurich
Under the patronage of the International association of Research Institutes
in the History of Art (RIHA)
Venues: SIK, Zollikerstrasse 32, und Kunsthalle Zürich, Limmatstrasse 270
Information and registration: c/o SIK: 01 388 51 51, Fax 01 381 52 50,
Email: sik@sikart.ch
Until May 3: 4 days, CHF 195.-/students CHF 75.-; after June 1: 4 days CHF
300.-/students 150.-; day pass: CHF 80.-/40.-
Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270
CH-8004 Zürich
Tel. +41 (0)1 272 15 15
Fax +41 (0)1 272 18 18