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17/1/2008

Chantal Akerman

Blaffer Gallery, Houston

Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, in collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Miami Art Museum (a MAC @ MAM presentation) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, is pleased to present Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space. The exhibition will be on view at Blaffer Gallery, located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston’s central campus, from Jan. 19 through March 29, 2008. It features five of Akerman’s major works: From the East: Bordering on Fiction (D’est: Au bord de la fiction), 1995; South (Sud), 1999; From the Other Side (De l’autre côté), 2002; Down There (Là-bas), 2006; and Women from Antwerp in November (Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre), 2007, which is a new project filmed especially for the exhibition.

Akerman is widely regarded as one of the most important directors in film history, but her work in the crossover genre of film and visual art has never been fully explored. Beginning with From the East: Bordering on Fiction in 1995, Akerman developed an artistic practice melding documentary filmmaking techniques with video installation. Imbued with social and political undertones, the works contain the artist’s characteristically slow moving action, mesmerizing attention to detail and visual grace. “We are pleased to present this opportunity for the public to see and experience the full range of Akerman’s work in her first survey exhibition in an American museum,” explained Blaffer Gallery Director Terrie Sultan. “The exhibition reveals her explorative and creative energies, as well as her singular understanding of some of today’s most challenging concepts and themes: the transformative impact of cultural diaspora, memory and history.”

In From the East: Bordering on Fiction, multiple video monitors fill a large, dimly lit room, retracing a journey that extends from the end of summer to the deepest winter, and from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltic states, to Moscow. This experimental documentary is a compendium of striking, interrelated images of Eastern Europe and its citizens in the transition period following the end of the Cold War. There is no narration, and the beautiful, enigmatic imagery conveys no clear point (except the idea of transitions). Instead, assuming a seemingly objective, omniscient point of view, Akerman’s relentless cameras deliver an impressionistic report from this new front.

Akerman’s South began as a “meditation on the American South,” inspired by her love for the work of writers William Faulkner and James Baldwin. Shortly before Akerman began filming, however, a black man by the name of James Byrd Jr. was brutally murdered in Jasper, Texas, and the direction of Akerman’s film quickly shifted from an elegant meditation on the South to a passionate documentary capturing the emotionally tumultuous aftermath of Byrd’s murder. The film opens in characteristic Akerman fashion with static images of a small church anchored in Jasper’s lush surroundings. Akerman then leads the viewer down the length of the road where Byrd’s body was dragged, contrasting the shock of racial violence with the transcendent beauty of the wild countryside along the fateful road.

From the Other Side is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants as they attempt the dangerous crossing from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Ariz. In this documentary, Akerman assumes an unobtrusive and objective standpoint, avoiding an omniscient narrator, who “might suggest an unequal power relationship between filmmaker and the filmed,” and using long camera angles that capture the miles of fence along the Mexico-Arizona border to produce an air of uninterrupted verisimilitude.

In a radical break from her distanced point of view in the works from her American Stories (Histories d’Amérique) series, such as South or From the Other Side, Akerman approached a subject directly linked to her own history in Down There. In fact, Akerman at first did not want to make a film in Israel, convinced that neutrality would be impossible and that her own subjectivity would interfere. “When I make a documentary, my greatest desire is that it have nothing directly to do with my own story or that of the Jews. I thought that, to contemplate Israel, one had to go to Afghanistan, or somewhere else, like New York, but certainly not Israel,” she explains. “Then I went to Tel Aviv University to teach film. One day I took the camera and sat down, and suddenly there was an image, a shot. I thought it was a great picture. After that, all I had to do was wait and let things run their course.”

Finally, Moving Through Time and Space will feature the world premiere of Akerman's new two-channel video installation entitled Women from Antwerp in November. The work, comprised of two monumentally scaled projections, explores notions of time and space through a series of short vignettes alternating between color and black and white, each featuring women smoking at night in various ambiguous settings. These short narratives – presented together in a long horizontal, split screen format – offer a compelling array of psychological and emotional scenarios as women engage in wordless social interplay. On the opposite wall, a single frame shows a languid four minute loop filmed in black and white of a young woman lighting, smoking and extinguishing her cigarette. Women from Antwerp in November is redolent in an atmosphere of 1950s French and American film noir, touching on Akerman’s foundation in feminist filmmaking and her deep connection to a highly personal, yet distant, cinematic point of view. “I made five moving images that work together like a landscape,” Akerman explains. “You can imagine what has come before and what might come after, but each short passage is, by itself, abstract and unsettled.” Sultan noted, “Akerman’s new film, commissioned expressly for Moving Through Time and Space, is a mesmerizing compendium of images and ideas centered around this singular activity of women smoking – an action that carries with it profound social, political and emotional implications. Akerman explores these complex references with beauty, grace and wit.”

Image: Chantal Akerman From the East: Bordering on Fiction (D’est: Au bord de la fiction), 1995 Video installation Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Media Contact: For more information on this story, please contact Assistant Director of External Affairs Jeffrey Bowen at 713.743.9528, or via e-mail at jbowen2@uh.edu.

Opening Reception Friday, Jan. 18, 7 to 9 p.m.

About Blaffer Gallery:
Founded in 1973, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, was named in honor of the late Sarah Campbell Blaffer, a noted Houston arts patron and collector. Since its inception, the museum has been a vital force in the presentation and promotion of contemporary visual arts in Houston. Blaffer Gallery is located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston’s central campus, entrance 16 off Cullen Boulevard. It is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.,

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