Horizontal, 2011

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Narrator: The first time “Horizontal” by Eija-Liisa Ahtila was shown, in a solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in 2012, she said that the work had grown out of another film project, where she had tried to capture large trees in a snowy landscape. She realised that it was impossible to portray an entire tree in a film except from a long distance.
 
This problem made her aware of the limitations of a film camera, and the limitations of the horizontal standard aspect of 16 x 9. To portray a tall fir tree, Ahtila had to choose between either showing only a small section, or the whole tree from far away, which automatically transformed the image into a landscape.
 
The harder Ahtila and her team tried to capture the whole tree, the clearer these limitations became. The project of portraying a fir tree had suddenly developed into a detailed portrait of the nature of film equipment. And since a film camera is a machine made to be an extension of our human perception, the result was that the harder Ahtila tried to see the tree, the more she saw herself.
 
“Horizontal” was originally a six-channel video projection. In the exhibition, “The Third Hand”, it is shown for the first time on LED screens.