The Present

Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin Tues-Sat 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-7pm Until May 23 01-6710073

Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila has built a formidable international reputation on the basis of her elaborately conceived, beautifully produced film installations, often using multiple projections. In fragmentary, oblique narratives, she explores extreme states of mind against the wider background of society’s underlying dysfunctions and contradictions. Not, you might be thinking, a barrel of laughs, and you’d be right. Often the mood of her pieces is some way beyond Bergmanesque in its psychological bleakness. They’re bearable because they’re so well done.

The five episodes that make up The Presentfocus on women "who have developed psychoses". We are plunged into their intensely subjective worlds. Ahtila does incorporate an affirmative note. Each episode concludes with the epithet: "Give yourself a present, forgive yourself".

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