Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Chantal Akerman – Travelling held at BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels & Jeu de Paume-Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. The exhibition traced the atypical trajectory of Belgian filmmaker, writer, and artist Chantal Akerman. From the very beginning in Brussels to the Mexican desert, from her very first films to her last installations in 2015. This is the first major exhibition on the Brussels-based artist, featuring unique and never-before-seen images, production, and working documents from her archive. Follow all the stages of her career through the years and places Akerman has traversed and filmed. She went there to work with media as diverse as film, television, text, and installation.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn’t talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter. With an introduction by Eileen Myles and an afterword by Frances Morgan.