Eija—Liisa Ahtila is not going crazy: a veteran of Documenta and of biennials from Istanbul to Venice to Sydney, Eija-Liisa Ahtila has become Finland's leading film-installation artist. Her dense yet concise narratives probe a range of human experiences, commonplace and extreme, while extending the medium's formal and expressive reach - Cover Story

Departing from the supportive setting of the gallery with Radar (1990), Ahtila designed satiric ads and comics for placement in different sections of a Finnish daily newspaper. Among the targets of the seven-part, weeklong intervention were environmental issues and cosmetics ads aimed at children. The seamless insertion of her art into conventional media contexts continued with Me/We, Okay and Gray (1993), a trio of black-and-white vignettes--the artist calls them "a short film in three episodes"--that initially aired during regular programming on Finnish TV. The third episode, which ambiguously presents three women coping with the aftermath of a nuclear accident, shows Ahtila still courting a certifiable "big issue," but in the first two she finds sufficient consequence in disasters of the domestic kind, as a family and a lover self-destruct.

To convey disappointment, miscommunication and discord, Ahtila introduced visual/aural disjunctions in which the voice of one character emanates from the mouth of another. Family members are blithely oblivious to each other's pain, and the behavior of dogs is invoked to express human desire and frustration. After these admirably concise dramatizations--and after a year in L.A.--Ahtila abandoned the TV-size monitor and scaled up with a pair of imposing three-screen DVD projections, If 6 was 9 (1995-96) and Today (1996-97).

Viewers are informed that If 6 was 9 (the title is from a Jimi Hendrix song) is "based on research and real events" that have been fictionalized in a collage of testimony and experiences. Five Helsinki girls, ages 13 to 15, kill time at home, hang out at a convenience store and mostly chat about sexual experiences, vicarious and personal. Dealing cards and clipping porn photos, they share memories of playing doctor, earning a reputation for being "loose" and--in a quietly hilarious inversion of Freud's valuation of the penis--the shock of discovering that men lack a third hole. The latter somehow connects with recollections of a child's View-Master version of the Pied Piper story, in which the charismatic musician leads the children into a "hole" in the mountain which closes up behind them. One of the girls, who appears no older than her companions, avers that she is really 38, having returned to the solidarity of schoolgirls after a bruising encounter with the treatment of women in the adult world.

Projected as a triptych on three abutted screens, If 6 was 9 includes multiple perspectives that elaborate a single moment, the periodic use of a black screen for concentration and an occasional panorama spanning the screens. By contrast, the screens of the DVD version of Today are angled to form a three-sided, open-cornered cove, and activated in sequence. On the left we see the daughter (the same actress played one of the girls in If 6 was 9), who tosses a ball, her attitude a mixture of boredom and disgust, and describes her father's paralyzing grief at his own father's recent death. The girl's final words are "I'm 66 years old." The action shifts to the center, where an older woman (the daughter at 66?) muses on the changes in society and concludes, "A rattling tram pronounces my dad's name." Finally, on the right screen, is the father, drenched in tears and all but howling with loss and regret.