Two very different female video artists have brought pleasantly complementary exhibitions of their recent work to the Tokyo Opera City Gallery. Elija-Liisa Ahtila, 43, from Finland, and Japanese artist Tabaimo, 27, both opened with impressive solo efforts at the spacious Shinjuku gallery Friday.
Ahtila's "Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations" features two video pieces and nine photographic works. The three-screen video projections here, like most of Ahtila's work, are documentary-style stories (although actors are used) about apparently normal people who are experiencing a period of emotional disturbance. The room-filling pieces are installed with one screen (about 5 meters wide) on the wall in front of the viewer, and the other two screens angled off on either end. Because it is difficult to watch all three screens at the same time, I found myself moving my head around a great deal more than I would when watching a single screen, and that was refreshing. It created a feeling of active investigation, of discovery.
I also found this three-screen format interesting because it allows for variations on the normal narrative structure -- and the success of Ahtila's work is largely due to these variations.