Eija-Liisa Ahtila: 6 interesting facts

Eija-Liisa Ahtila (born 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland) is a contemporary visual artiste and filmmaker who lives and works in Helsinki.

Ahtila experiments as soon as narrative storytelling in her films and cinematic installations. In her earlier works, she dealt with the topic of unsettling human dramas at the center of personal relationships, dealing with pubertal sexuality, family relationships, mental disintegration, and death. Her complex works, however, pursue more highbrow artistic questions where she investigates the processes of keenness and attribution of meaning, at period in the buoyant of larger cultural and existential themes, like colonialism, faith and posthumanism.

Ahtila has participated in numerous international art exhibitions such as Manifesta (1998), the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2005), documenta 11 (2002), São Paulo Art Biennial (2008) and the Sydney Biennale in 2002 and 2018.

Ahtila has won several art and film awards, including the inaugural Vincent Award (2000),Artes Mundi (2006),Prince Eugen Medal (2008), and most recently Art Academic in Finland (2009).

In 2002 she had a solo put on an act at Tate Modern, and in 2006 her multi-screen video piece The Wind (2006) was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has then had solo shows at the Guggenheim in Bilbao,Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Parasol Unit in London, ACMI in Melbourne and DHC/ART in Montreal.

Her conduct yourself is held in the collections of the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is a former professor at the Department of Time and Space-based Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland).