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  • Chantal Akerman

  • Until Sep 14
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  • This event has finished
  • Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Rd, London, NW3 6DG
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  • Camden Arts Centre

    Women From Antwerp in November (Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre) (detail) 2007. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

  • By Rebecca Geldard

    Posted: Mon Aug 4

  • I’ve often wondered whether cinematic art films wouldn’t be better projected in a picture house. In this case, the gallery is the right and proper container for three film works by artist-filmmaker Chantal Akerman. They make for a compelling suite, but the evidence here of Akerman’s ambitious handling of conceptual art and narrative film constructs also offers a cautionary tale on getting caught between the two.

    ‘Hotel Monterey’ (1972) is an early-career experiment during which, over the course of an hour, the French artist explores pretty much every facet of a tatty New York hotel. While its purpose here is clear – to situate the detached formalist style now synonymous with Akerman’s framing of human encounters – the claustrophobic and repetitive nature of her filming will make you desperately envious of the retro cast of guests able to escape from each long-held shot through doors and lifts.

    A bevy of Belgian women smoking shows Akerman the filmic anthropologist at her finest: making art out of the way cinema handles the female subject, but the real crux occurs in the deeply moving two-part video
    ‘To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge’ (pictured, left). It’s not the odd title or the difficult subject matter (an intimate conversation between Akerman and her mother – the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust – concerning her maternal grandmother’s diary) but the installation of film and sculptural elements. From the blurry split-screen to the rolling swathes of projected text in French on the surfaces of a tulle tunnel, no single piece of information is allowed to excel in the job for which it was intended. There is something of the wedding spectacle here about Akerman’s construction of barriers between the audience and this very personal material – during which you can’t help but feel as though the issue of the day has been over-styled during the organisation of the ceremony marking its passing.
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