PARIS.- Jeu de Paume pays tribute to Belgian filmmaker, artist and writer Chantal Akerman (Brussels 1950 - Paris 2015) with an exceptional exhibition, conceived by the Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts, The Chantal Akerman Foundation and Royal Film Archive of Belgium (CINEMATEK), in collaboration with Jeu de Paume for the presentation in France.
Chantal Akerman: Travelling outlines her unique journey from the early beginnings in Brussels to various deserts, from her first films to her final installations in 2015. Featuring unique and previously unseen footage, production, as well as work documents from her archives, this is the first major retrospective of the Brussels-based artist.
The exhibition traces the various stages of Chantal Akerman’s career and also sheds light on the different locations where she has worked and filmed. It also showcases the versatility of her work, including film, television, literature, and installations.
Born in Brussels in 1950, Chantal Akerman was one of the first filmmakers to regularly use this city – the place of her birth and the very fabric of her work – as a film city in its own right, rather than just a passing backdrop. Brussels, Paris, New York, Mexico… All these places and geographies stayed with her and shaped her cinematic practice over the years. They form a journey of art and of life that is deeply moving and never fails to surprise, ranging from the burlesque to the tragic, from the realm of the musical to that of global or intimate suffering, and from the bedroom to the desert.
Today, Akerman is regarded as an inspiration for all generations and a role model for many filmmakers and artists. Todd Haynes, Gus van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Claire Denis, Christophe Honoré, Sharon Lockhart, Wang Bing and Michael Haneke have often pointed out the influence Akerman has had on their work. Furthermore, her film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named the best film of all time by Sight and Sound (the magazine of the prestigious British Film Institute) in 2022.
In the exhibition Chantal Akerman: Travelling Visitors will discover several artistic installations brought together for the first time including In the Mirror (2007), Woman Sitting after Killing (2001), D’Est, au bord de la Fiction (1995), A Voice in the Desert (2002) and Selfportrait/Autobiography: A work in progress (1998). They will discover never-before-seen rushes and exceptional audiovisual material and paper archives from the Fondation Chantal Akerman (photos of shoots, scripts, dialogues, location scouting photos, statements of intent, etc.).
From the burlesque to the tragic, from musicals to personal suffering and that of the world, from the bedroom to the desert. The bio-filmography, animated by quotes from the filmmaker, traces the general timeline of these multiple journeys. It documents her reflections on cinema and her working processes, linking her presented works with their accompanying archives. It also demonstrates how her radical and poetic work closely resonates with our time.
« Why start out with a tragicomedy in which you play yourself? Why turn away from it to make experimental, silent films? Why, once you’ve finished making those on the other side of the ocean, do you come back over here to tackle narrative filmmaking? Why do you stop acting and then go to on to make a musical comedy? Why do you make documentaries and then adapt Proust? Why do you write a play, and then write a book? Why do you make films about music? And then finally you do another comedy. And then you’re also doing installations. Without calling yourself an artist. Because of the word: artist. » -- Chantal Akerman (2004
Curators : Laurence Rassel in collaboration with Marta Ponsa
