A Possible Image - of what is just becoming reality

Life is teeming and swarming all around us. Birdsong, the whisper of spruce forests, and the unfolding of leaves give way to the first snow of winter, covering the landscape in a damp, muted stillness. In A Possible Image – of what is just becoming reality, Eija-Liisa Ahtila opens doors to a cinematic universe in which relationships between humans, animals, and the changing Nordic landscape take centre stage. The exhibition explores how change becomes visible and how it affects our lives. Through the artist’s large-scale moving-image installations, we are invited to explore and reconsider our human position within an ecological context. At its core, the exhibition is about connection – in intimate relationships, within and between species, and in our longing to belong to the world around us.

Can We Love Beyond Our Own Species?

The exhibition follows two interconnected strands that also reflect Ahtila’s work over the past decades. The first asks: Can we love beyond our own species? At what point do we begin to distinguish ourselves from the world around us? The second considers the forest as a relational space, an archetype for how life exists. And how the forest as a model persists even in places that no longer exist as forests. Throughout her extensive career working with the moving image, Eija-Liisa Ahtila has developed a strong belief in the power of the imaginary and the imagination – in the transformative moment that takes place through intuition in the creative process, from writing the script, to filming and editing, and ultimately in the viewer’s encounter with the work of art.

Reflection of a Forest

A key work in the exhibition is Reflection of a Forest (2025), filmed at various locations in southern Finland over a period of three years. The fifty-minute film installation allows us to sink into the distinctive rhythms of the seasons and their cyclical shifts. The work explores the spatiality of existence – how life inhabits a shared space sustained by the diversity of its inhabitants. In a scene between a dark tree and a young Chinese-speaking man, the sensory connection between species becomes particularly powerful. The tree’s roots support the human body within the landscape, while through breathing, carbon dioxide is exchanged for oxygen. The human experience of losing someone close is held by nature’s regenerative capacity and enveloping force. In the work, the forest becomes a model, an archetype of coexistence. It offers a framework through which we can also consider how human activity has shaped the landscape into a patchwork of fragments of natural forest, managed nature, and urban environments.

Potentiality for Love

A maternal figure approaches the viewer, floating in from a galaxy in the universe, before landing in an embracing gesture. The installation Potentiality for Love (2018) consists of a sculptural LED screen. In the same room, we encounter a chimpanzee whose gaze is turned away from the viewer, alongside two research tables. The arrangement recalls a treatment method for phantom pain, in which a mirror is used to affect the memory traces left by pain in the brain. Here, the mirror has been replaced by a monitor, and instead of a human forearm, the viewer encounters the arm of another primate – a chimpanzee. Potentiality for Love explores attachment and the capacity for love and empathy within and between species. How is the physiological boundary drawn between ourselves and our closest relatives, with whom we share 98 per cent of our DNA?

Ulleråker Madonna

The themes of the exhibition are further developed in Ulleråker Madonna (2026), a permanent film installation in Ulleråker, Uppsala, which will be realised in the autumn. Ahtila draws on the collective community that once existed here – a psychiatric hospital complex centred around the old Hospital. In the film script, the lives of patients and caregivers are described as “…twisting together around a shared ideology and a desire for a good that, as far as possible, belongs to everyone.” The work incorporates elements of magical realism and references medieval Madonna sculptures and the way they have often served as gathering points for a place and its community. Hopefully, this contemporary Madonna can offer a kind of healing presence. Perhaps she can carry some of the site’s pain – of psychological suffering and isolation – while also becoming a protector of the area’s living worlds and its threatened species.

Fiction That Creates Reality

In the exhibition A Possible Image – of what is just becoming reality, Eija-Liisa Ahtila places the viewer on the threshold of a possible future. Through the camera lens, we can step into this world and become part of it. But what kind of reality is it? At its core, it is about life and our relationship with other living beings in a time of ecological uncertainty. Or, as the artist puts it, it is about “how we perceive the change in our world and how we allow it to enter us and transform into understanding.” Ahtila portrays an ecological world in which time and space emerge through multiple, interconnected perspectives. The forest becomes a model for how all life might exist together – and perhaps also for how we humans might live. In the forest, beings exist side by side in mutual dependence – an archetype of symbiosis, a superorganism of interwoven relationships.