Finnish artist born in 1959.

Works mainly in video art, which she thinks is the medium that interacts the most with human
senses. When she was in school, her main interest was writing. She still makes work from
the perspective of a writer, using video and sound as her pen, so to speak.

Ahtila is interested in how to present images so that they are not always serving an
overhanging narrative or story. The image ​is ​information in its own right. How does the
medium of the moving image communicate?

Common for all her video work is the idea that we are all part of nature and that we need to
see ourselves this way. Likewise, she is inspired by the concept of umwelt, which describes
the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. Every experience is different from the
next.
Horizontal​ ​- Vaakasuora ​(2011) consists of six separate video projections placed next to
each other horizontally. Each frame captures a section of a large spruce tree (in Finland?)
laid sideways, and each video is captured in different times. When making this work, Ahtila
was confronted with the impossibility of capturing a ‘portrait’ of a whole tree within one single
frame, the limitations of the camera and the aspect ratio of the screen format. Far distance to
fit the tree into the frame would make it a landscape image, while close proximity would
inevitably mean that parts of the tree would be cut out. Using a wide-angle lens would distort
the image, and it would no longer be a ‘true’ image of the spruce.

This work shows that there is so much happening around in nature than one person, or one
camera, can take in all at once. Ahtila found that the more they tried to, and I quote, “capture
“tree” in the images, the way we humans think a spruce looks, the more we just had to go
back. […] We were kind of hidden inside the technical equipment, which are actually made
for the extension [of] the human perception.” They ended up seeing themselves. This is how
they see.

Ahtila initially wanted to capture the tree in five frames, but eventually she had to let go and
let the tree decide the format and number of screens. The tree demanded six screens.