The exhibition will consist of two large-scale video installations by Eija-Liisa Ahtila. This will be the first presentation of work by Ahtila in Kansas and the Great Plains region. The Annunciation takes as its starting point one of the best-known Christian stories: the moment when the Archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to announce that she will give birth to the Son of God. Ahtila’s The Annunciation makes reference to many powerful images of this moment found in Western art, but also sets the events of the story in the present, where the story is being reenacted by a cast of non-professional actors and trained animals, who play a major role in the work. Ahtila creates a moving rumination on the nature of perception and knowledge, the meaning of the miraculous, the ways humans might expand their circle of concern to non-human species, and the power of familiar stories to allow us to perceive the world in profoundly new ways.