The exhibition ‘Chantal Akerman: Travelling’ will be inaugurated on April 16 and open to the public the following day. This exhibition showcases various stages of the filmmaker’s career and revisits the years and places she explored and documented, addressing diverse media such as cinema, television, writing, and installation, as noted by the CCB in a press release.
This marks the first major retrospective dedicated to Chantal Akerman in Lisbon after being previously exhibited in Brussels and Paris. It coincides with the tenth anniversary of the filmmaker’s death in 2015 at the age of 65.
According to CCB, the exhibition maps out the artistic and biographical journey of the multifaceted Belgian artist, featuring images from her productions and previously unseen archival documents, collected by the Chantal Akerman Foundation.
The exhibition will be on display at the MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art until September 7, and will include a series of initiatives, including a guided tour by director Marta Mateus and a reading of ‘A Family in Brussels’ by Chantal Akerman, performed by actress Beatriz Batarda, on May 17, aligning with International Museum Day.
The opening on April 16 will see the presence of the exhibition’s curator, Laurence Rassel, and the president of the Chantal Akerman Foundation, Sylviane Akerman.
In collaboration with the exhibition, the Portuguese Cinematheque will host a short film cycle from May 24 to 30, featuring the presence of Director of Photography Sabine Lancelin.
“News from Home” (1976), which includes readings of correspondence between Chantal and her mother during the filmmaker’s stay in the United States, and “Jeanne Dielman” (1975), starring Delphine Seyrig and considered Akerman’s major work and an example of feminist cinema, are among the films to be screened at the Portuguese Cinematheque.
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’, which marks 50 years since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was declared the greatest film of all time by the British magazine Sight&Sound in 2022.
Chantal Akerman passed away in Paris in October 2015, leaving behind what French newspaper Le Monde described as an “incandescent, pioneering, and nomadic” body of work.
In 2012, the Portuguese Cinematheque, in collaboration with the DocLisboa festival, highlighted how Akerman shared “the spirit of a post-Nouvelle Vague generation,” with works that reveal “narrative experimentation, formal inventiveness, and a rigorous documentary observation of reality, making them unique objects, distinguished by their complex relationship with all that they film.”
Two years following her death, a foundation was established to preserve the archives and safeguard the rights of Akerman’s work, focusing on film restoration, retrospectives, publications, and exhibitions.
