Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows

Creator of unforgettable films, Chantal Akerman is one of the great artists and filmmakers of the last 50 years. This exhibition, envisaged with her before her death, brings together historic works and recent installations as a tribute to her importance in the field of contemporary art.

Chantal Akerman’s work in film brought her international recognition. From her beginnings until her death last year she ceaselessly reinvented her formal vocabulary and way of looking at the world, moving with unparalleled freedom between genres: feature-length fiction and documentary, comedy and drama, and video installation. Her influence on the cinema’s most famous directors is indisputable, but her legacy to the visual arts, while less known, is just as fundamental.

In her host of different projects Akerman blazed a trail—between reality and fiction, the narrative and the experimental, history and memory—that artists of all kinds are exploring more and more. Summoning up all the possibilities of the cinema image and of vision, space and performance, her singular approach to so many issues—frontiers, changes of place, racism, identity, the relationship between personal and public space—has played a crucial part in the evolution of the visual arts.

For the first time in France, the art centre is presenting Maniac Shadows, one of her last video installations. In images shot in or from her living spaces in Paris, Brussels and New York—and in an intertwining of here and there, of interior and exterior—we hear her reading letters to her mother in which she meditates on her life and the world. Maniac Shadows is at the core of a journey of rediscovery, taking us through unknown parts of her oeuvre, from that first short feature made when she was 18 to a recent work for radio. This immersion in her personal universe is brilliantly accompanied by Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s cello and an imagining of how to “inhabit space.”

Space, time, the image, music, the intimate, politics: through these multiple points of view the exhibition speaks eloquently of the relevance of Akerman’s practice and ideas.

Related programme:

Discussion around No Home Movie with Claire Atherton
November 30, 2016, 7:30pm

Talk by Sébastien Rémy
Tant que je vous parle ce n’est pas une frontière [As long as I’m talking to you there’s no border between us]
December 13, 2016, 6pm 
École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 14 Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris

Toute une journée Chantal Akerman
[An entire day dedicated to Chantal Akerman]
Performances, lectures, screenings in association with the Ferme du Buisson cinema
January 14, 2017, from 2pm to midnight

Interventions by the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton
November 3, 2016 / February 19, 2017, 2–7pm

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