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

Time and events, like point of view, are discontinuous or recurrent. Seemingly different characters have the same name, a car accident happens in both the recent and the remote past, unrelated events have a strange symmetry. Conjuring that stage when an adolescent becomes hyperaware of a parent's body, the daughter fixates on two vertebrae of her father's back, which correspond to the place where her grandfather's suspenders crossed. Later, the father experiences a sensation of shame, as if his own suspenders had failed and his pants fallen down.

As with If 6 was 9, Today essentially presents a girl's-eye view of life that is acute and merciless. Parents are absent or self-absorbed, dads are clueless and morose, women are trapped or obsessive. This is not a seasoned feminist perspective so much as the vision of a young woman who sees only limited possibilities ahead. Two years later came the thwarted, desperate wife of Consolation Service.

With one group of works delving into the "normal" suffering that accompanies adolescence, marriage and the death of a parent, Ahtila moves to the extremes of psychotic behavior in her latest films. She interviewed mentally ill women as research for the fictional narratives that play out in The House and four related works: Swaying Curtains, Ground Control, The Bridge and The Wind. Centering on five women who narrate their disquieting histories, the films dramatize hallucinations, obsessions, phobias and furies, and are peppered with references to therapies and hospitalizations, abusive parents and a physical world whose laws have proved unreliable. Footage for the stories was edited to make two versions of "The Present": a group of five 30-second public-service announcement-style spots broadcast on Finnish television, and five 1-to-2-minute DVDs for presentation on monitors. The TV spots all close with the New Agey injunction "Give yourself a present, forgive yourself"; in the monitor format, which is intended for galleries, the admonition is printed on blankets hanging or folded nearby, and the monitor showing The House is furnished with headphones for the direct delivery of the sounds that torment Elisa.

In yet another incarnation, the five segments of "The Present" are enriched with additional footage and shown consecutively in a 56-minute film called Love is a Treasure (2002). In this format there are some changes in details (Swaying Curtains has been renamed Underworld) and more substantive elaborations as well. The young girl in Ground Control who lies down in a mud puddle to spite her prim, disapproving mother here returns in what may be called a second act. Portrayed by a slightly older actress, she discusses her contact with aliens whose ships look remarkably like the two-hole buttons of her mother's pink gingham blouse. The brief prologue to Love is a Treasure shows a veterinarian caring for a badly injured guinea pig. At the film's end, four of the women reminisce about their childhood pets, a number of which were killed by the girls' moms. A postscript shows the recovered guinea pig eagerly munching a treat. It's a redemptive vignette that invites optimism about the prognosis for all concerned or, more grimly, it's the condemned's last meal.