UPPSALA.- Life is seething and bustling. Birdsong, the wind in the spruce forest and budding leaves are followed by the first snow of winter that wraps the landscape in muffling moistness.
In A Possible Image—of what is just becoming reality Eija-Liisa Ahtila opens the door to a cinematic universe of relationships between man and animal, feelings and reflections on the variability of Nordic nature. The exhibition at Uppsala Art Museum consists of grand cinematic installations from the period 2018–2025: Potentiality for Love, Reflection of a Forest and April ≈ 6101’ 2427’. They are presented in connection with the production of the artist’s first public work Ullerker Madonna, commissioned for a park in Ullerker, the former psychiatric hospital area in Uppsala.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila has been called a master of cinematic installation. With this exhibition, she embarks on her fourth decade of experimenting with moving image and its spatial potential. From her breakthrough’s, psychologically poignant works, the artist has moved towards a broader philosophical exploration of being, time, and, above all, how the medium of moving image can shift focus towards the more-than-human and reconsider an anthropocentric approach.
Two thematic threads run through the exhibition. One concerns attachment — between humans, other species, and the world we share. The other explores the intertwined life of the forest, where mutual dependence sustains and shapes the whole.
The eight-channel work Reflection of a Forest (2025), is a key work in the exhibition which receives its international premiere and enters the Uppsala Art Museum's collections. Shot in Southern Finland over the course of three years, Ahtila followed a number of locations through the changing seasons. With technical precision and a distinctive poetic sensibility, the work presents the forest as a living web of relations. Reflection of a Forest is shaped by a specific group of performers: a farmer and the soil, a lake with the birds, bats, beavers, a swarm of dancing insects. The work dwells on the spatiality of being—how life exists in a shared space that is upheld by the diversity of its inhabitants. In the artwork the relational space of the forest becomes a model for how all life might be. It provides a framework through which we can observe human activities and the Anthropocene patchwork of virgin forest, cultivated land and urban environments. The forest is conceived as the epitome, that persists as a reflection even when it no longer exists as forest.
By expanding the spatial and narrative possibilities of film, Ahtila creates immersive works in which time, scale, and perception are shifted. In A Possible Image—of what is just becoming reality the viewer is invited into worlds where the boundary between the human and the more-than-human is set in motion. In a time of ecological uncertainty Eija-Liisa Ahtilas fiction creates other realities. Her work asks how change in the world becomes visible to us—and how it can gradually take hold in our consciousness and turn into understanding.
Curator: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Uppsala Art Museum.
Catalogue
A richly illustrated catalogue expands on the themes of the exhibition through newly commissioned essays, poetry, scripts, and visual material that trace both the exhibited works and their artistic development, shedding light on the artist’s own writing. It features contributions by Cary Wolfe, Riikka Stewen, Giorgio Agamben ( previous published essay Taxonomies), Catherine de Zegher, and Gunilla Stillstrm. The publication is a co-production by Uppsala Art Museum, Public Art, and Crystal Eye / Ilppo Pohjola, with graphic design by Jarkko Ojanen.
