Moving Through Time and Space
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.,