Chantal Akerman NOW

About

Entitled NOW, this will be the first large scale exhibition in the English-speaking world of Akerman’s installation work and will coincide with the UK premiere of her new film, No Home Movie (2015), on Friday 30 October at Regent Street Cinema, London. None of the works in the exhibition has been previously exhibited in the UK.

 ‘Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation’ J. Hoberman

There will be seven works at Ambika P3: the centrepiece will be NOW (2015), a powerful 8 channel video installation with surround sound originally commissioned for the Venice Biennale 2015. For this work, Akerman collected images from desert regions, specifically violently contested regions in the Middle East, her aim to present the current condition of violence and conflict as lived experience.

Other works in the exhibition span from 1995 and investigate a variety of emotive themes such as issues around the border of Mexico and America (A Voice in the Desert, 2002), the atom bomb and Hiroshima (Maniac Summer 2009), woman reclaiming images of herself (In The Mirror), the dichotomous relationship between presence and absence (Maniac Shadows 2013), the Eastern bloc countries before the fall of Communism (D’Est 1995) and the sublime (Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï 2007).

Chantal Akerman (b. 1950 Belgium, now Paris based) is one of the most unpredictable, farsighted, indefinable, rigorous and playful film artists of her generation. While showing the troublesome complexity of human existence, Akerman’s works are filled with beautiful imagery, music, magic of chance, yearning and hope, yet she also investigates hot-button themes such as racism in the American South, illegal immigration, and terrorism in the Middle East.

Chantal Akerman: NOW is jointly curated by Ambika P3 (Michael Mazière) and A Nos Amours (Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts) and presented in association with Marian Goodman Gallery. It is supported by a grant from Arts Council England.

EVENTS:

No Home Movie (2015), 115 minutes – UK première
Presented by Chantal Akerman
Friday 30 October 2015, 7.30pm
Regent Street Cinema

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”  Chantal Akerman, 2015

Chantal Akerman – Masterclass
Friday 30 October 2015, 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Regent Street Cinema

Interviewed by Marion Schmid, Professor of French Literature and Film, University of Edinburgh whose books include Chantal Akerman, published by Manchester University Press, 2010.

Events organised by A Nos Amours and CREAM (The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster).