Installations

Chantal Akerman’s cinema explores in many different ways major themes of humanity. Among them, the notion of places being both personal and foreign, of mental freedom in limited spaces and of boundaries to be crossed. Akerman went deeper into these questions and confronted the emptiness of the ‘white cube’ space often found in museums and galleries.

In 1995, along with her editor and long term collaborator Claire Atherton, she redesigned her film D’Est to create From the East: Bordering on Fiction. This large video installation unfolds over three rooms and spreads itself out over twenty-five monitors. Since then, Akerman created more than fifteen video installation works, mostly but not always, using her long feature films as a point of departure. In the process of creating spatialized objects, Akerman kept wondering how to give the sense of a familiar yet uncanny atmosphere and to create an intense spaciotemporal experience.