Catalogue > At random

WHERE IS WHERE? is based on an incident which took place during the Algerian independence war in 1950?s. Reacting to the acts of violence committed by the French, two young Algerian boys murder their friend, a French boy. The story, told in multiple simultaneous images, starts in the present day as Death enters the house of the Poet. She starts to investigate these past events, which gradually become interwoven with the present moment. A mist clears from the back garden of the Poet`s house to reveal a small row-boat which has appeared in the swimming pool. In it sit Adel and Ismael.

EIJA-LIISA AHTILA Born in 1959 in Hämeenlinna, Finland, Eija-Liisa Ahtila is visual artist and filmmaker. Her films and multi-screen installations explore and experiment with narrative storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences. Her works deal with separation, loss, sexuality, relationships among family members, mental disintegration, and death. They investigate the processes of perception and the attribution of meaning, with breaking down the story on several screens around the viewer in the space. Making installations and films has become for her a process of identifying the links between images, sounds, rhythms, light, characters and words, and using them to approach and construct the story. Eija-Liisa Ahtila was the recipient of the Artes Mundi of Cardiff, Wales in 2006, the Vincent Van Gogh Biannual Award for Contemporary Art in Europe, Maastricht, The Netherlands, as well as the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Switzerland, both in 2000, and the Edstrand Art Prize, Sweden in 1998. Ahtila attended Helsinki University, Faculty of Law (1980-85); Independent Art School, 198184; and London College of Printing, School of Media and Management, Film and Video (1990-91). She received a Certificate from U.C.L.A. in Film, TV, Theater and Multimedia Studies, Los Angeles (1994-95) and attended special courses at the America Film Institute, Advanced Technology Program, Los Angeles (1994-95). Ahtila has exhibited extensively at numerous museums and film festivals around the world and her films have received distinctive film awards and prizes over the years. Her work has also been widely seen on television in Europe. British Film Institute has published a home DVD box of her films titled The Cinematic Works of Eija-Liisa Ahti/a. Eija-Liisa Ahtila currently lives and works in Helsinki.