world rush_4 artists
Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s three-screen video installation The House, 2002, raises numerous questions. When you see a toy car ride on a living-room wall, a cow walk into an ordinary house, and a woman fly across treetops, it is easy to think of fairy tales. The fantasy of flying appeals to a deeply felt desire for freedom from conventional limitations like gravity, and seeing miracles in a film can easily put the viewer in the mood of the child enduring within us all. But we know that fairy tales harbour more than lightness, and the narrator and central character of The House is an adult woman, Elisa, whose story is based on interviews with women who have gone through the painful experience of psychosis. Ahtila describes her works as 'human dramas', by which she implies they are fictional narratives that emerge from lengthy periods of research. It is easy to look at The House as an account of psychosis. Perhaps, though, this work is not at all about fantasy or psychosis, but only uses those experiences to do something else altogether?

Ahtila’s keen observation of time, along with the film’s strange suspensions and the severance of sound from image, is a first indication that the possibility of storytelling itself is at stake. ‘Once upon a time’ sets the story world safely in a different time frame, but the walls of this house fall away.