Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Marian Goodman Gallery

We met Eija-Liisa Ahtila at her hotel this spring while she was showing new installation pieces at Marian Goodman, New York. Her films are documentary, experimental and narrative all at the same time. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, born in Finland in 1959, is one the most talented video artists in the last decade. After a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris that is now touring to K21 in Düsseldorf (until August 17), Marian Goodman Gallery showed two of Ahtila's most recent "human dramas": Fishermen/Etudes n°1 and Where is Where?. In this first opus of an upcoming series of short "studies", fishermen in West Africa set out for the high seas and keep being flung back by the waves.  Where is Where?, a 53-minute long installation featuring six screens and eight sound channels, meditates about death, time, words, colonialism, and the intertwining of different cultures. In the interview Eija-Liisa Ahtila will tell you more about the true historical event she re-enacts for the film, as well as her sources, her artistic path, and the way she works on scripts and on the moving image. You will grasp how complex it is to construct a narrative or to direct the actors' gaze in accordance with the beholder's place. Our report tries to make you experience how it feels to be surrounded by these screenings. We hope you will find it as emotionally and aesthetically stunning as we did.