KEY POINTS:
Although the show by Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is only the fourth exhibition for Auckland's Two Rooms, it is a highlight for gallery owner Jenny Todd.
She first encountered Ahtila's work at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Then in 2002 she visited a retrospective of the artist's work at London's Tate Modern, which included her favourite, Consolation Service.
Now Todd is delighted to be showing one of Ahtila's new works, The Hour of Prayer.
"One of the focuses of the gallery is on video installation, so to bring her work out is fantastic for me," Todd says.
"It's really difficult to get these artists to show in New Zealand ... they want to make sure it's shown in a totally professional way, and that they have the right space to show it."
Ahtila makes sumptuous cinematic works that are often shown at film festivals or on television, but multiscreen gallery installations are her preferred format.
"When in a cinema watching a film, the viewer is situated in the best position in regard to what is happening on the screen," Ahtila says.
"Everything has been constructed for this certain experience, starting from the microphone positioning at the locations to editing of the image from one shot to the other. So a lot of the choices are made already. In a multiscreen installation you can't experience everything at once. Things are happening in the space. This means that the viewer has to choose."
Although Hour of Prayer is autobiographical, Ahtila usually creates scripted, fictional scenarios that use actors and simultaneous images to experiment with the processes of storytelling.
"In my works I intend to tell a story but in a way which breaks the structure and chronology of the traditional way of narrating," she says of the works that play with the perception of time by spreading her enigmatic dramas around the exhibition space on multiple screens.
Hour of Prayer, which won the international Artes Mundi prize in Wales this year and was featured at last year's Venice Biennale, is a narrative about dealing with grief and loss.
It relates personal experiences surrounding the death of her dog.
"The approach in Hour of Prayer is kind of the opposite," she says. "I was fascinated by the events which took place in my life and astonished how the things seem to lead from one to another.
"I do not believe in chronology, but my own real life turned into a perfect one.
"It looked like the events during that year would form something like a string of pearls presented to me one after the other.
"Even if it was something completely opposite from my usual approach, I could not resist the story.
"The story presented itself to me, a perfect chronology which somehow gets its justification from the absolute - the death."
Todd has a background working with European artists, having spent 15 years running her own London gallery. "I wanted to bring a bit of that to New Zealand, show them alongside New Zealand artists, and hope that they will then get invited back to Europe," she says, "and the New Zealand public can see works that they would not normally see."
In establishing a roster of local artists for Two Rooms to represent, Todd was pleased to find a strong selection of established artists without an Auckland dealer, particularly those working with video and photography.
"I think they maybe felt that because their work was more public gallery work they didn't need dealer galleries so much because most of them have sold to museums, as opposed to private buyers."
Having fitted Two Rooms with state-of-the-art equipment, Todd hopes to offer facilities that even many public galleries can't offer such artists.
Another special feature of Two Rooms is that it has a studio that will be offered to artists for residencies to support ambitious and experimental projects. The first artist participating in the residency programme is British photographer Bridget Smith.
She arrived last month and will be visiting South Island observatories before returning home for Christmas.
"I quite like the idea of showing one New Zealander and one European at the same time, so they have a dialogue," Todd says.
From mid-December, work by Smith will be shown alongside local photographer Fiona Pardington, who has also been working in the South Island.
* The Hour of Prayer by Eija-Liisa Ahtila is at Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, to Dec 16
