Eija-Liisa Ahtila is one of the most famous contemporary Finnish artists. She became known in the global art scene in 1990s for her thoughtful, immersive video installations which merged fiction and reality. In her earlier works Ahtila has dealt with the unsettling human dramas at the centre of personal relationships, dealing with e.g. teenage sexuality, family relations, mental disintegration and death. Her later works deal with profound and basic artistic questions where she investigates the processes of perception and attribution of meaning, at times in the light of a larger cultural and existential thematic like colonialism, faith and posthumanism. During the last decade she has sought to disengage moving image art from anthropocentrism and searched for ways to use the language of moving image to convey a relevant image of environmental change in this era of climate warming, overconsumption and mass extinction.<\/p>\n
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“Potentiality for Love” is her latest installation, created in 2018. It deals with the potential for empathy and love towards other living beings. It turns attention to those human emotions that could serve as a foundation for dismantling the hierarchical structures between living things, thereby engendering a turn towards non-humans and the recognition of others. The work reflects the origins of these emotions, how we define them and how we conceive of their function as part of a larger continuum of living beings.<\/p>\n