Women on the Verge of a Very Finnish, Somewhat Cubist Breakdown NYTimes

INTERNATIONAL reputations and travels aside, artists typically rely on the solitude of a private studio to cultivate and execute their creative efforts. For the Finnish visual artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila, this is a fifth-floor loft studio in the old Kaapeli cable factory, overlooking an inlet of this watery city. Guarding the door behind a low wire barrier is her Catalonian shepherd, Harrison, recognizable as the same shaggy and endearing breed as Luca, an earlier pet whose death is featured in Ms. Ahtila’s 2005 installation film “The Hour of Prayer.”

That four-screen dramatic film is the only work among her “human dramas,” as she calls them, that is autobiographical. It was shown this year at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff, where in March Ms. Ahtila won the Artes Mundi international prize (about $74,000) for contemporary art with a human context. In April, her film “Ground Control,” about extraterrestrial contact, was viewed by 400,000 people a day on four billboard-size screens installed in busy sections of Tokyo.

This week Ms. Ahtila is coming to New York for Wednesday’s opening of her 14-minute film installation “The Wind” at the Museum of Modern Art. It will be accompanied by showings of her related feature-length film, “Love Is a Treasure.”

Sitting in her pristine studio here, which adjoins Crystal Eye, the film production company of her husband, Ilppo Pohjola, Ms. Ahtila described her medium as “moving images of stories that have already happened.”

She is primarily a fiction writer who draws on the world of human psychosis, mainly female, to transform individual case studies of mental illness into an imaginary dream world. By breaking the logical sequence of the narration, she introduces a Cubist interpretation of events that emphasizes perception over causality.

A no-nonsense woman of 47, dressed casually in jeans, a brown sweater and black running shoes, Ms. Ahtila is surrounded in her studio by warehouse shelving with neat upright file boxes and the kind of Finnish modern design elements — bright orange and red couches, a sleek water pitcher and glasses — that make visits to Helsinki so visually satisfying. Between films, she concentrates on serial photography; her current subject is women and Christian iconography. A Fra Angelico poster hanging on her studio wall states: “And every woman will be a walking synthesis of the universe.”

Ms. Ahtila views her film work more as theater than cinema, a new art that sets a stylized stage for fiction. Working in close collaboration with her cast, she often finds that an actor’s interpretation will improve her original concept of a character. During full production, script pages are pinned to the studio wall and she depends on a crew — cinematographer, set and prop designers, lighting and sound specialists, wardrobe and makeup people — for the technical and visual quality of her films.

But when she visited New York in January 2005, it was without a script or film crew, and the city was engulfed in a major snowstorm. She filmed the streets at night herself from her hotel window in Chelsea and around Madison Square Park, capturing the same enticing luminosity as that of a winter night in Helsinki. Thus began a chain of events — “a string of pearls,” she calls it — that became “The Hour of Prayer.” The film tells the story of Luca’s death from bone cancer, but is really about the stillness and emptiness of grief and the loss of what Ms. Ahtila calls “sensory surroundings.”

From those early scenes of New York, the film cuts to the winter landscape of her country cottage on a Finnish lake. It is evident when one views this landscape of icy waters against dense forests, shot as a still life and given greater depth by the zigzag configuration of rectangular screens, that her art belongs as much to the tradition of Finnish landscape painting from the early 20th century as to the world of film. (She began her art studies in Helsinki, rebelling against the prevailing abstract tradition, before studying film in London and Los Angeles.)