Eija-Liisa Ahtila

As often seen in the work of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (1959), the video installation Talo – The House (2002), speaks of extreme psychic experiences. This triple projection shows a young woman in her house, for the artist a “sort of metaphor for the human spirit”, and tells of the slipping of her perception from the limits of reality into a more and more psychotic state. With no apparent emotion, she speaks of the interpenetration of space and time, of the interior and the exterior, and finally shuts herself into the dark by blocking all the windows in her house with black fabric. For Talo – The House, Ahtila used interviews with women who have lived through psychotic experiences. The video oscillates in the fragile equilibrium between sobriety, menace and poetry.