Eija-Liisa Ahtila's 'Parallel Worlds' at Carré d'Art, Nîmes

The exhibition 'Parallel Worlds' by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, previously at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, will travel to Kiasma Museum in Helsinki the following summer. At Carré d'Art in Nîmes (October 12, 2012 – January 6, 2013), Ahtila presents model houses as mental spaces, drawings, and six multi-screen video installations. Recurring motifs—theatre stages, empty chairs, waves, fir trees, levitating figures, animals—provide familiar anchors within unsettling worlds. The show explores surreality and madness, as in 'House' (2002), where a panicked woman retreats to a cabin as her car moves alone and the garden invades. 'Where is where' (2008) intertwines a contemporary poetess's timeline with the Algerian War, depicting Algerian children killing a French comrade after a French army massacre. Archive footage and reconstructions blend as the poetess visits the past and soldiers enter her living room. Ahtila's interest in Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt theory—that each species inhabits its own world—informs her multi-screen approach. Crows and fir trees become characters; the video 'Horizontal' slices a fir tree like a scanner, rejecting anthropocentric perspective. Drawings show conifers bowing like the Annunciation angel.