Jeu de Paume hosts Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Monday, 03 March 2008 21:13

PARIS, FRANCE - Jeu de Paume presents Eija-Liisa Ahtila. From the start of her career in the 1990s, Eija-Liisa Ahtila has been considered one of the leading proponents of 'video art'. She makes films which she describes as 'human dramas' in which the characters are seen grappling with their emotions, their entourage and an unstable environment. Ahtila's working methods bring video close to cinema, notably by using its vocabulary and shooting techniques. She explores different registers (fiction, advertising, documentary) while playing on perceptual phenomenon so as to interrogate the capacity of narrative to reproduce reality.

Jeu de Paume-Concorde is giving this Finnish artist her first retrospective in France. It covers pretty much the full extent of her work, from the early 1990s to the present, and features most of her films, including a new one produced in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume, but also her series of photographs. For this event all the spaces of the Jeu de Paume-Concorde will be given over to her work.

The works of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, which are mainly video installations, present narrative sequences with a strong psychological content. Their subjects are love, jealousy, anger, mental illness, filiation, grieving, and — most pervasively — death. Like a film director, Ahtila writes and films fictions whose protagonists are in the grip of extreme emotions, expressing their fears, going through crises, experiencing unexpected events that disrupt their vision of the world. In these stagings Ahtila questions the position of the individual in relation to their entourage (family circle, group of friends, etc.), the notion of Self and Other, intimacy and the loss of individuality.

From a formal point of view, Ahtila exploits all the possibilities of film language, ranging across the registers of cinema fiction, documentary, advertising, trailers and video clips. By interrogating the construction of narrative, she reminds us of the complex role of images in our society and their influence on our perceptions.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in 1959 at Hämeenlinna, in Finland. She began her studies in Helsinki before going on to specialise in film and video in London (London College of Printing, School of Media and Management) and then in Los Angeles (UCLA and American Film Institute). She had her first solo exhibitions in 1990. She lives and works in Helsinki.