Facing the Image is an exhibition by Chantal Akerman. Curated by long-term collaborator Claire Atherton, the exhibition explores Akerman’s film installations developed in collaboration with Atherton over several years, unfolding the sequential dimension of the moving image into three-dimensional space.

Offering a non-prescriptive approach to Akerman’s work, the exhibition proposes an embodied experience of her films where fragmentation and repetition are privileged over linearity and narrative structure.

This exhibition follows a presentation at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2023.

Chantal Akerman particularly liked working on installations because she felt enormous freedom. She liked us doing everything 'at home', without there being any need to explain what we wanted to achieve to anyone. She used to say that, more so than a film, an installation could not be described in advance. Rather, it was something that developed gradually in the work itself.

And then we loved asking even more of our spectators, basically by not making the work too easy to digest. We liked asking them to move, to explore. We sought to build a space that would set them in motion and awaken their thinking.

This exhibition will reflect our work; it is an invitation to explore, to meet and to experience.

The exhibition will propose an itinerary—both free and structured—through some of Chantal Akerman’s works.

Some with sound and others silent, some in black and white and others in colour. And some photos, too.

An itinerary through images and sounds assembled and installed in the space. Installed but not fixed. An itinerary during which visitors can take their time, move forward, go back, get closer, stand back and get closer again. And find their own pace.

A journey through some works that are very intimate and others that are more open to the world, all of which are nevertheless political due to their form and their presence.

—Claire Atheron