Veil of Ignorance (for Parkett no. 68)

Eija-Liisa Ahtila explores the complexities of human experience and suffering in films, projection works, and photography. Influenced by philosophers and feminist thinkers, Ahtila’s emotionally charged narratives often take on female trauma, probing ideas around identity and the relationship between self and other. She is concerned with “how the subconscious is inherited in some way,” as she describes. In The Wind (2002), which is based on interviews with women who suffered mental breakdowns, Ahtila portrays the internal experience of one woman battling such a collapse. In Where Is Where? (2009), a six-channel projected installation, a European poet, with the help of a character personifying Death, tries to understand an event that occurred 50 years earlier during the Algerian war, when two Arab boys killed their French friend.

Hämeenlinna, Finland