Skip to Content

The Arts Intel Report

Chantal Akerman: Travelling

Chantal Akerman

Apr 17 – Sept 7, 2025
Praça do Império, 1449-003 Lisboa, Portugal

Chantal Akerman was born in 1950, in Brussels, to Jewish Polish parents who had survived the Holocaust. At 18, she funded her first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), with money she made by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. Akerman, who’d wanted to be a filmmaker since 1965, when she saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, went on to make groundbreaking films of her own. She challenged feminist tropes and influenced the Belgian avant-garde. Akerman died in 2015. This exhibition traces her atypical journey, from Brussels to the Mexican desert to the installations she created just before her death, in 2015. —Elena Clavarino