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December 5th, 2008
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Grand illusion

Hot talk from a cool climate by a video auteur

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
June 4th, 2008 issue

Ahtila captures the kind of candid gossip that teenagers typically share only with each other, with helpful subtitles.
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The solo exhibition at Tranzitdisplay by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a well-established video artist and photographer from Finland, gives Prague audiences a rare chance to see early works by this first-rate artist in an intimate setting.
Ahtila, born in 1959, has a strong background in film and video. Her exposure to life and study in two major film and media capitals (London and Los Angeles) is clearly evident in her works. The exhibit at Tranzitdisplay, presented by the Stockholm-based art foundation Index, includes three works: Tender Trap (1991), Secret Garden (1994) and the showcase piece If 6 was 9 (1995).
In the first room, Tender Trap (likely named after the 1955 Hollywood film starring Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds) is a silent slide show or storyboard on five panels. There is an image of a couple making out at the bottom of a stairway, under an overpass; a close-up of a young woman’s face with a man’s hands covering her eyes; a lighted stage with only a small bouquet or package on it; a man opening a car door and leaning his head out; and a man and woman looking at a large, architecturally impressive building. On two of the raised panels, the projected images overlap or bleed onto the wall.
There is a storyline to the images, printed in both Czech and English. The text is a dialogue between a man and woman, talking about their past relationship and the morality of artists using real-life experiences and actual people (unbeknown to them at the time) in their artworks.
There is also a soundtrack — unnoticed at first — of street noise, background music and possibly talking, though it’s hard to make out with an even louder soundtrack coming from the next room.
Secret Garden is a wall installation consisting of 18 posters parodying film promotions. Starring two extremely ordinary-looking teenage girls, it presents a “silver screen” B-movie in which “the seducing sophistication of the feminine is conceived to be synonymous with that of illusion itself.”
The centerpiece of the show, the video If 6 was 9 (whose title is taken from the classic Jimi Hendrix song), begins with only text (in English) at the bottom of three large screens set side by side. The action shows two young teens at the end of sexual intercourse, who then talk about it afterward.
The video also shows teenage girls telling stories about their sex lives, some slightly perverted and explicit. At times it is hard to decipher what is reality and what is fantasy. While one screen shows the narrator telling her story, the other two screens show scenes of her daily activities. The narrations are like diary entries, and with text running on all three screens, the viewer can concentrate on any one screen and still follow the girl’s story.
In many scenes the girls are together, sitting around talking and laughing, apparently sharing stories with one another. They seem easygoing about sharing the details of their sex lives, and talking about their common interest in sexual matters; from their monologues we gather that they may be outcasts among their peers because of this attitude.
The stories are interspersed with mundane scenes of Helsinki, where it seems to be constantly drizzling. Sometimes the screens flash like a slide show, while at other times they go blank for a few seconds. Girls are seen studying, flipping through magazines, cutting their toenails, playing basketball or the piano. One girl on piano provides the soundtrack for other sections, though there are also snippets of heavy metal in the segues between scenes.
For Ahtila’s 2002 exhibition “real characters, invented worlds” at London’s Tate Modern, this most prestigious of contemporary museums described her work in this way: “Love, sexuality, jealousy, anger, vulnerability and reconciliation — the powerful emotions underlying human relationships are explored in the works of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila.”
Overall, Ahtila’s stories of relationships and sexual encounters reveal an openness about lost innocence. However, the teenage girls’ stories also leave the impression that innocence at any age is an illusion, a false ideal or, more than anything else, a lie.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (4/06/2008):

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