An assured grasp of film language together with a merciless questioning of subjective coherence means that none of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s films makes for easy viewing. Cumulatively their effect is one of profound discomfiture. Tate Modern’s “Real Characters, Invented Worlds” (which originated at Helsinki’s Kiasma and was shown concurrently at the Kunsthalle Zürich under the title “Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations”) was listed in Ahtila’s biography as containing “several works.” In reality it provided a substantial survey of her art of the past decade, including a selection of her photographs

Gilbert & George began as “living sculptures,” confounding the seemingly self-evident distinction between artist and object. Even since their work took a primarily photographic form three decades ago, its central trope has remained their own emblematic presence. So one of the most striking aspects of “The Dirty Words Pictures,” 1977, is how understated the presence of the artists’ image is in comparison with the work that led up to and follow edit—even on a quantitative level. In eighteen of the twenty-six works, each member of the partnership is present in just one out of the sixteen or