Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Born	1959 Hämeenlinna, Finland
Education	UCLA, American Film Institute
Known for	Video Art

Eija-Liisa Ahtila (born 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland) is a video artist and photographer. She lives and works in Helsinki.

Her first conceptual works were motivated by art philosophy, by a critique of art institutions and by feminism. She focused on the construction of the image, language, narrative and space. In her recent films she focuses more deeply into individual identity and the limit of the self and body in relation to the other.

In 1998 Eija-Liisa Ahtila participated in the second edition of Manifesta. She was the winner of the inaugural Vincent Award in 2000. In 2002 she had a solo show at Tate Modern, and in 2006 her multi-screen video piece The Wind (2006) was exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In the same year she won the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize in Cardiff, Wales.

Her work is held in the collection of the Tate. She is a former professor at the Department of Time and Space-based Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland).

Most of Ahtila's works are focused on women going through a traumatic experience, and most display multiple screens and vantage points of the story, simultaneously. This mode of presentation intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer's senses, sometimes confusing one's ability to follow and understand the narrative thread intellectually, in order to produce a strong emotional impact.

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