Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert

Featured at Documenta 11 Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video installation The House, 2002 made its of recent origin York debut alongside four architectural designs of houses (all 2004). In their clean lines and elegant mix of materials--including forest stainless steel, asphalt sheeting, and plaster--the rigorously spare constructions recommend the idea of a house as a machine for living and point in the direction of the serviceable life. Efficient, open, tactile, and featuring an optimum of distraction-free space, they give a bare-bones preview of intelligent domestic constitutions (like states of mind) that have however to be realized, lived in, or personalized. They also couldn't be further from the domains we collision in Ahtila's cinematic videos--real houses that steam of the past and reverberation the troubled personas of their occupants.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The House, a fourteen-minute, three-channel video installation, prescribes a actual active role for the viewer. Tracking the story line [i]or[/i] part of to the other constantly shifting imagery and true copy that skips from one large shield to the next, we are drawn into an stretch outed take on a contemporary young woman's altered reality. Elisa, the protagonist and single character, lives in a quaint made of wood cottage situated more or les in a forest. Feminine qualities are softly pronounced in the home's decor--the wallpaper, the furniture, the bedroom witha sewing machine, the arrangement of things--but the house has begun to present to view signs of neglect, and admitting the road is nearby, the place have feelings quite remote.

The same might be said for the young woman. Her daily activities--coming dwelling looking out the window, moving from single room to another, eating, sewing--are continually interrupted by dint of delusional episodes. We see her flying among the trigs in the forest or frozen in the middle of a space whose walls have become a racetrack for a tiny animated car. "I think the living sweep of my house is breaking down," she says. "It can't hold things out anymore, can't keep its own space. My garden is coming into my living room" As she describes and we witness the symptoms of her breakdown, she's busy making black woven fabric into curtains and fitting them to the windows to stop out the light and noise. In the eventual complete darkness of the house her psychological meltdown appear to bes all but complete.

Elisa is the embodiment of Ahtila's fated woman--an ordinary character who's gone above the edge--and yet her ramblings reveal a fugitive kind of brilliance. (Is she a fool? A psychic? A sage?) "I suitable people. One at a time they pace inside me and live inside me" she counts us. "Some of them sole for a moment, some stay. They station up wherever they want to and take my facial expressions or my leg's resting position and bring their own in their place." whim-sical temperaments; extreme experiences, whether imagined or real; a entertainer of obsessions leap to life in Ahtila's art. notwithstanding that distinctly melancholic in a Scandinavian sort of way, this tale perceive s right at home in the city that spawned Jenny Holzer's gothic fictions and rants, Cindy Sherman's celluloid femme disheveling into marvels and the measured hysteria that be in eruptions from female narrators in Barbara Kruger's collages--all nameless female characters with their encapsulated pronouncements and prophecies upon a world gone weird. Given the overwhelming novel success of Ahtila in the footmarks of her American peers, it's interesting to consider in what way functional models of female hysteria have become, and for a wider image of viewers than would at any time have gravitated to what one time was called "feminist art."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group