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In excess, elsewhere and otherwise: Feminine subjectivity in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s multi-screen installation If 6 Was 9 (1995)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-03-13, 13:37 authored by Elspeth MitchellThis paper engages with the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray as a way to theorise the experience of viewing the audio-visual installations of Finnish artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila’s work traces specific narratives concerning feminine desire and subjectivity across multi-screen apparatus in gallery environment. The space of exhibition and film form initiate a mode of encounter that motivates a different relation of projector, screen and viewer. Ahtila’s multi-screen installations insist that we look to the places of exclusion in discourse and to the silences in representation for meaning elsewhere, in excess and otherwise. The exclusion in discourse is for Luce Irigaray of course the feminine. Irigaray articulates a view that textually and performatively demands we recognise the impossibility of a feminine position. I take up this problematic with specific attention to how Ahtila’s audiovisual installation If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1995) produces and disrupts traditional cinematic representation to examine how the space of installation, multi-screen form and the filmic space lend itself to a different encounter with the cinematic. By tracing the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in philosophical and audio-visual texts, the article develops and refines a position from which one might view contemporary cinematic experience.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- Arts
Published in
Networking KnowledgeVolume
8Issue
5Citation
MITCHELL, E., 2015. In excess, elsewhere and otherwise: Feminine subjectivity in Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s multi-screen installation If 6 Was 9 (1995). Networking Knowledge, 8 (5), https://doi.org/10.31165/nk.2015.85.395.Publisher
Media, Communication and Cultural Studies AssociationVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This paper is closed access.ISSN
1755-9944Publisher version
Language
- en