Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film The Hour of Prayer (2005, 14 min.,12 sec.).

The work consists of an installation made up of simultaneous DVD-projections with sound, which will be shown continuously on four adjacent screens in the South Gallery. This will be the first U.S. presentation of the work, which was seen earlier this summer and fall in “The Experience of Art” in the Italian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale.

The Hour of Prayer is the artist’s most personal work to date, a short tale of attachment and loss, based on the artist’s own life. The events begin in New York during a winter storm in January and end in Benin, West Africa, eleven months later.

“The first part of the narrative retells a classical tale, in which the words and events explain each other and form a chronological progression. As the narrator speaks, words for time are prominent and images and sounds record the changes of season in various landscapes… The work moves away from the events in the story and the attribution of meaning, becoming a more general presentation of a private experience… The intention is to explore the possibilities of disrupting the traditional causal logic, structure and space for perception in screen narrative…”—Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Eija-Liisa Ahtila has long been considered a master of the multimedia form. Her work is conceptually organized around the construction of image, language, narrative, and space, and she has often probed individual identity and the boundaries of the subject in relation to the external world. Exploring the fragile inner life of her protagonists and the tenuous line separating fantasy from reality, Ahtila’s narratives provide tales of disturbing intimacy, loss, repression, and neuroses and are often focussed on the unsettling emotions at the heart of personal relationships. Using the visual language of cinema, Ahtila presents large-scale installations with split-screen projections on multiple panels. These viewing conditions, with their simultaneously charged vantage points and stories, enhance the experience of a psychologically mutating time and space.

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