Passages
June 1–August 30, 2020
Chantal Akerman burst onto the film scene at the age of just 18 with her unsettling short film Saute ma ville (1968). Some years later she achieved widespread international acclaim with Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). This understated, minimalist portrait of the mundane chores of a Brussels housewife and part-time prostitute made her a pioneer in terms of the female perspective and, as such, in the world of feminist avant-garde cinema. In a pared-down, anti-dramatic style—later dubbed “slow cinema”—Akerman had exposed the oppressive nature of a housewife’s daily routine and put a face on the hidden life of countless women.
In the summer of 2020, Eye Filmmuseum presents a major solo exhibition devoted to the work of Chantal Akerman, who was born in Brussels in 1950 and died in Paris in 2015. Midway through the 1990s she was among the first film directors to discover the possibilities of the exhibition space. In 1995 she took her documentary D’Est and reworked it as a large spatial installation featuring 25 monitors. This marked the start of a second, parallel career in the world of visual art.
In its exhibition policy, Eye focuses precisely on this crossover area where the disciplines of cinema and visual art meet. And with her innovative and unrelenting approach, Chantal Akerman played a pioneering role in this area.
Much of Chantal Akerman’s progressive work attests to her avant-garde attitude to the medium she employs. Features of her highly individual style are long shots, frontal camera positioning and wide frames, enabling her to put forward a new interpretation of time and space.
Akerman’s works embody history, memories, lives that seem normal, but are not. A hallmark of her oeuvre is a detached approach to what looks like “ordinary life,” but where a profusion of violent events, memories, traumas and emotions lurk just beneath the surface. Herself the child of an Auschwitz survivor, Akerman charges the mundane with significance. Moreover, her own life forms a reference point, with themes such as migration, trauma, Jewish identity and the role of women echoing throughout her work.
Akerman’s films and installations often feature ambiguous in-between spaces, hybrid transitions, flowing passages between documentary and fiction, between museum space and movie theatre, between film genres, between experiment and narrative, between a personal and a detached approach, and between physical and mental space. Yet there are also real passages from one place to another, movement and migration captured in long takes. And time keeps ticking away steadily, the time that you almost always experience physically, bodily.
The international art world quickly recognized the remarkable quality of Akerman’s visual work; a series of exhibitions in celebrated museums followed, including shows at the Walker Art Museum (1995), Jeu de Paume in Paris (1995), Documenta XI in Kassel (2002) and MUKHA in Antwerp (2012). Akerman also took part in the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2015.
Publication
Accompanying the exhibition is a lavishly illustrated publication with texts by Chantal Akerman herself, as well as essays by Cyril Béghin, Dana Linssen and Roos van der Lint. Cyril Béghin introduces her oeuvre and discusses the historical tensions in her work, rooted in personal family traumas dating from the Second World War and Akerman’s way of liberating herself from any form of belonging. Roos van der Lint zooms in on the spatial installations. Dana Linssen’s philosophical essay explores the concept of time in Akerman’s work and in that of other filmmakers and artists.
Design: Joseph Plateau. Published by Eye Filmmuseum in collaboration with nai010 publishers, Rotterdam.
Films, talks and events
A programme of films, talks and events will be held in the cinemas during the exhibition period.
The exhibition and publication have been made in collaboration with Claire Atherton, representative of the Fondation Chantal Akerman and Akerman’s long-time editor, and with Carole Billy, associate director of the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris.
