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The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, presents the exhibition Chantal Akerman. Facing the Image [A1 Gallery, until 19 October 2025]. Inviting visitors to embark on a journey through some of the installations that emerged from the collaboration between Chantal Akerman (Brussels, 1950 – Paris, 2015) and Claire Atherton (San Francisco, 1963), the exhibition is curated by the latter. The show represents the second chapter of a project that was previously presented at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona. As part of the exhibition, a public programme focusing on the filmmaker will take place from 14 to 16 July, featuring Atherton and Erika Balsom, a researcher and lecturer in film studies at King’s College London. Artium Museoa has also published a new issue of its #Hitzak series of publications to accompany the exhibition, featuring a conversation that took place between Claire Atherton and Valentín Roma, the director of the Catalan venue, for the exhibition in Barcelona.
This exhibition dedicated to Chantal Akerman offers us a journey through some of the installations that arose from the close collaboration between the filmmaker and the curator, Claire Atherton, the editor of her films since the mid-1980s. Bringing together moving image and photography, the show acts as the second episode of the exhibition project presented at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona between November 2023 and April 2024.
This new presentation maintains the original curatorial premises while adding a museum itinerary that unfolds through a succession of spaces that position the spectator’s body at the centre of the work. Like a system of communicating vessels that connect image and text, the works in the exhibition are arranged as a circular journey to occupy the museum’s space. As in her film production, these works are constructed as a bricolage of time and narrative, with the exhibition space added to this as an active element. From this place – as it occurs on the screen – new forms of relationship are proposed that question the very definition of the human as viewed from a feminist perspective.
Chantal Akerman’s works, also in Artium Museum, construct and project genealogies, intertwining the lives of women, of those who form part of her autobiography (survivors of the Holocaust) with migrant women from Mexico, not only in the USA, but also of those caring for Akerman’s mother in her Brussels apartment... A network of care and collaboration from which a political thought and way of positioning herself as a filmmaker in the world unfolds, which is at the origin of this exhibition.
As part of the exhibition, Artium has published a new issue of its #Hitzak series of publications, for which an extensive conversation between Claire Atherton and Valentín Roma (artistic director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona) has been recovered, a conversation that originally took place for the exhibition Facing the Image in the Catalan venue. The publication also features a text on Chantal Akerman’s work in Artium Museoa by the museum’s director, Beatriz Herráez, as well as detailed information on each of the installations presented in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
On 14, 15 and 16 July, the museum is also organising and hosting a seminar that will focus on Chantal Akerman’s film work and her personal view of cinema. Curated by the curator and film critic Andoni Imaz and Arantza Santesteban, Research and Public Programmes Curator at Artium Museoa, the activity will be attended by Claire Atherton, curator of the exhibition we are presenting today, and Erika Balsom, researcher and lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-curator of the Shoreline Movements film programme for the Taipei Biennial (2020) and author of books such as TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017).