Film / video retrospectives

Chantal Akerman
35 films and videos between 1968 and now During her 25 year career, the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman has used her camera to re-conquer that original fascination of the cinema with the movement of life - a life, an often very ordinary life, which, observed with a calm eye or a measured rhythm, reveals her humanity with an astonishing force. Be it in her fiction or in her research, she displaces the conventional sources of the signifier, even when she gives up character, narrative strategy, at the place where it is being shot, and even language, so that her images and the rhythms which validate this signifier may emerge organically. Her cinema is one of expectation, of passages, of constantly varying resolutions.

K. Halbreich / B. Jenkins in the Walker Art Center Minneapolis catalogue / Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume

Rebecca Horn
25 films and videos from 1970 to 1992 Working with simple and essential materials (water, metal, sulphur, paint), Rebecca Horn produces «human machines» which have no other aim than to perform themselves in a gracious and poetic show. By their movements they display the beauty of forms and also the tension of machines. And this tension, this contained and latent energy, is found again in another form in her films and videos. For Rebecca Horn, since the early the seventies, has also laid on performances and films which present bodies, of dancers or her own, caught in machines, fabrics or shackles. Then later, it was on actors that she pursued her research, creating roles in which they are constrained or play with constraints.

Roman Signer
Born in 1938, he lives and works in St. Gall. Because he likes playing with fire, he blows up tables and suitcases, he fires a pistol into barrels of water and floats balloons along valleys, Roman Signer always manages to captivate us. Through the productions that he creates, he succeeds from the outset in holding us in the suspense of their development. Wicks burn, liquids are spilt or helicopters fly. The show begins. Yet Signer is there, like a civil servant; he puts the elements in place, carries out his action, and goes away. The truth is that his actions which are noisy and impressive are not supposed to be spectacular. Quite the contrary, they are, as it were, evidence of derision and irony.

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