Eija-Liisa Ahtila's two-screen video installation Consolation Service won critical acclaim at the Venice Biennale in 1999. It offers Away from Home's most literal representation of a traditional domestic unit, as we watch the disintegrating marriage of a young couple with an infant. Adjacent dual images convey this fictionalized real-life drama, and as the story unfolds, the narrative shifts between documentary and fantasy. Like many contemporary artists, Ahtila is concerned with a visual culture in which the reproduced image has become the basic reality, and the self both a reflection of those images and a refraction of their many competing languages and forms.
