Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman's work in film brought her international recognition. From her beginnings until her death last year she ceaselessly reinvented her formal vocabulary and way of looking at the world, moving with unparalleled freedom between genres: feature-length fiction and documentary, comedy and drama, and video installation. Her influence on the cinema's most famous directors is indisputable, but her legacy to the visual arts, while less known, is just as fundamental.

In her host of different projects Akerman blazed a trail – between reality and fiction, the narrative and the experimental, history and memory – that artists of all kinds are exploring more and more. Summoning up all the possibilities of the cinema image and of vision, space and performance, her singular approach to so many issues – frontiers, changes of place, racism, identity, the relationship between personal and public space – has played a crucial part in the evolution of the visual arts.

The exhibition is built around one of her last video installations, Maniac Shadows, presented here for the first time in France. Bringing together filmed images of places she has lived in, photographs and a reading by Akerman of her novel Ma Mère rit (My Mother Laughs), Maniac Shadows is the core element in an exhibition that helps us discover little-known sections of her oeuvre. Ranging from her first short feature, made when she was eighteen, to a sound work for radio in 2008 and an experimental film, this immersive experience is accompanied from time to time by the cello of special guest Sonia Wieder-Atherton.

Space, time, the image, music, the intimate, politics: through these multiple points of view the exhibition speaks eloquently of the relevance of Akerman's practice and ideas.

in partnership with Wallonie-Bruxelles International and with the support of the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris also with the backing of Marian Goodman Gallery and Vidi Square