View of “Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows,” 2013. Photo: Jason Mandella.

“And here or elsewhere, I don’t have a life. I didn’t know how to make one. All I’ve ever done is leave and come back.” – Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs

HEARTBREAKING AND DISTANCED, straightforward and oblique, Maniac Shadows, an autobiographical sound and image installation by Chantal Akerman, is impelled, like all of the artist’s films and gallery work, by the most primal relationship: the mother/child dyad. Most viewers of Akerman’s landmark film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), think of the titular character as a part-time whore, but I’m sure that to herself and to Akerman she was, first of all, a mother.

In 1995, Akerman showed her first video installation, D’Est, a travelogue about Eastern Europeans displaced from their way of life after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Akerman finds diasporas everywhere. A Family in Brussels (2001)—a text about her mother, Nelly Akerman, dealing with the death of her husband—was initially presented in the US as a staged reading and subsequently published by Dia Art Foundation as a book and a CD. What’s most remarkable about the text are Akerman’s fluid shifts between speaking in the first person as herself and as her mother. Her great To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004) contains the Rosetta Stone for all her work, a diary written by her maternal grandmother, who was murdered in Auschwitz. The diary was found after the war by Nelly, who showed it to Chantal and her sister. Mother and daughters wrote their own messages of love in the diary, an object that links three generations of women. Everything in the installation is either behind or projected onto gossamer veils, and yet it is Akerman’s most nakedly personal work, containing, in addition to the diary, another glimmer of hope that the fraught mother/daughter dyad can be positively resolved: a double-screen projection of Akerman “interviewing” her mother, which concludes with Nelly embracing her daughter, saying, “My dear girl, I am so glad I lived to see this day.”

Such resolution is no longer possible in Maniac Shadows. Occupying two rooms of The Kitchen’s second-floor gallery, the installation generates signature Akerman tensions: between here and there, presence and absence, exterior and interior. In the room we first enter (the exterior), we are confronted by a triptych of video projections spread across a long wall. They depict, in relatively short fragments, some of the places where Akerman has taken up residence during her peripatetic life. There are New York street scenes and the Tel Aviv apartment where she made her diaristic video Là-Bas (2006), with its wall of windows covered with blinds that diffuse the sunlight and act as an imperfect barrier against the dangers of the outside world—a way of observing without being observed. There’s a beautifully furnished living room where Nelly can be seen, a tiny figure on a blue settee; a kitchen and a bedroom that might be part of Nelly’s apartment; a hallway in Akerman’s apartment, but who knows in which city; a close-up of a TV screen where Obama’s 2008 election is being celebrated; and quite a few more. And there are the images that give the installation its name: Akerman’s shadow, sometimes alone, sometimes shoulder-to-shoulder with the shadow of a taller woman, cast on the sand or on the water—an ephemeral index testifying that once upon a time someone was here. Or there. Certain of the images, including those of the shadows, are simultaneously projected, slightly dim and out of focus, on the side walls. The doubling produces the disorienting sensation of being able to see an entire image with both frontal and peripheral vision.

View of “Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows,” 2013. Photo: Jason Mandella.

The sync sound from the three video projections mix with one another and also with the sound of Akerman’s voice reading the opening chapter of a long text titled My Mother Laughs. If one follows the voice into the second (interior) room, one sees projected at the extreme left of the back wall a video of Akerman seated at a table reading aloud from a pile of loose pages. The text is the crux of the matter, and yet we only see Akerman from the side as she reads. She is not speaking to us, but she allows us to overhear her words. At the other end of the room, a wall is covered with a grid of ninety-six unframed still photos, many of them shot in the same places as the videos in the exterior room but here frozen in time. Looking at the photos, we become even more aware of the text that Akerman is reading. The room is dark, the walls painted black. This is the space of the psyche, of subjectivity. In here, the sounds from the videos in the outer room seem far off, as if outside those ubiquitous windows in Akerman’s movies.

The evening before the installation opened, Akerman gave an extended reading of the text from which the video reading is excerpted. She stopped after about ninety minutes, having read only the first quarter of the text, which she described privately as “a monster” and “circular, like a womb.” The reading was an uncomfortable experience. Akerman voice was hoarse from exhaustion and cigarettes. She was angered by the sounds of the latecomers, clanking up the stairs to the top of the audience risers to find seats, and even more angered by people clanking down the stairs to leave while she was still reading. (The Kitchen needs to do something about that entrance. In the old configuration of the space, there were back stairs leading to the top of the risers, which made comings and goings less conspicuous.) But what made the reading so profoundly painful is the separation anxiety that motors the text.

Akerman knows that her mother does not have long to live. She was not expected to survive a recent hospital stay but she did and, for the moment, she is at home and surprisingly strong. In the text, Akerman describes in detail her mother’s current medical condition and behavior—what she says, what she eats, how her relationship to her daughter may or may not be different—as if to write this down and read it aloud could forestall the inevitable end and also act as a memento mori after the inevitable happens. This is not an unusual practice. But Akerman also assesses her own situation in relation to the impending breach in the symbiosis between daughter and mother. She sees herself as “an old child” who has defined herself by repeatedly running away from her mother’s house and returning to it from all the far-flung places where she made the great work referenced in the installation—as if those works were elaborations on the child’s game of “fort-da” described in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. What will she become when there is no place to which she can return? That is the implicit question in the text and in the installation. The only thing that matters, she says, is “Life or not.”

Chantal Akerman’s Maniac Shadows runs through Saturday, May 11th at The Kitchen.

— Amy Taubin

Left: A holy dip on Paush Purnima, the last full moon of the first month of the Hindu calendar. Right: The entry to Sector Nine of the Kumbh city. (Photos: Dan Morrison)

THE MAHA KUMBH MELA, a fifty-five-day Hindu festival at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati rivers in northern India, is said to be the largest gathering of humanity on earth. From the masses of poor and middle-class Indians seeking a purifying immersion in India’s holiest river, to the armed companies of ash-dusted (and hash-fortified) ascetics eager to display the might of their holy orders, tens of millions of pilgrims converge on the stately city of Allahabad, which hosts the festival every twelve years.

It’s a scene that’s impossible to ignore, and an essential experience for an author researching a book on the mysteries of the Ganges River. I hadn’t come for purification but to learn the stories of some among the millions who had, and also to behold the quantum logistics at work in the accommodation of so many people in such a small area for this one time.

New to the ways of the Kumbh, I spent my first night here in a “luxury” tented hotel that was as near to the divine as Walmart, and quickly shifted to the more basic camp of a respected swami, where sermons and chanting filled the day and everyone washed their own dishes and bathed with buckets. Each Kumbh Mela sees more pilgrims than the last, an increase that regularly outstrips the abilities of government administrators. Last Sunday, February 10th, thirty-six pilgrims were killed in a stampede at the Allahabad Junction railway station during one of the most important bathing dates.

On that day, a massive procession of sadhus from thirteen ascetic orders, or akharas, many of them brandishing cutlasses and tridents, descended from their tented camps to the sangam, as the confluence is known. According to official estimates, as many as thirty million people bathed in the river over the weekend. “It’s all the things which are wonderful about India in its most exotic way,” Prashant Panjiar, a photographer and veteran of several Kumbh Melas, told me. “Photography thrives on the spectacle.” And of course many visitors—be they researchers, artists, explorers, or tourists—are drawn in by that very spectacular documentation.

Saddhus with a work by Kay Walkowiak. (Photo: Kay Walkowiak)

Sadhus are the defining image of the Kumbh Mela, and they are the sounding board for conceptual artist Kay Walkowiak, who has been visiting the ascetics in their camps and asking them to “interpret” minimalist-style painted panels. While a few were dismissive, others have indulged Walkowiak by explaining what the panels might mean. “I use these pieces as a trigger,” he said. “A field of play is set up and then it is not up to me anymore. Art is about communicating; I thought it would be interesting to get their reaction.”

Katarina Weslien, a multidisciplinary artist, had been here since the mela’s January 14th opening. Sadhus are an easy point of access to the Kumbh Mela, but she’s less concerned with the parade of naked ascetics than with questions of “how people make individual meaning and find moments of privacy in absolute chaos.” On January 27th, an important bathing day marking the last full moon of the first month in the Hindu calendar, Weslien, armed with a camera and an audio recorder, stood at the confluence for ten hours and watched as a trickle of pre-dawn bathers swelled to a peaceful torrent arriving by foot over a series of pontoon bridges from their mist-shrouded encampments across the Ganges. “It was flow,” she said, “and every one of those people had their own individual moment as they dipped into the water.”

To accommodate these visitors, a 7.5-square-mile tented city has been erected outside Allahabad on the silvery Ganges floodplain. There is an odd technocratic feeling to the place. With its incongruous grid of clearly-signposted and assiduously-swept streets, guaranteed dusk-to-dawn electricity, plentiful water and sewer connections, and a near-absence of disorder, this temporary metropolis can feel, initially at least, like Singapore-on-Ganges.

A sadhu and his friend pass a group of oglers. (Photo: Dan Morrison)

At night, readings from the Ramayana, public-service announcements, and Hindi devotional disco numbers—all amplified to wedding-strength volume—dominate the night air, their cacophony infiltrated at times by the pious music of a single harmonium or acoustic ritual chants. Large tethered balloons float over the vast grid of tungsten street lamps, advertising mobile phone carriers and Close Up toothpaste, and calling to mind the aura of Blade Runner.

It’s a strange brew, this pop-up city of salesmen and swamis, bathers and bureaucrats. While the Kumbh Mela doesn’t want for artists, India’s art scene lacks an institutional presence in a space where its political parties, retail brands, and popular godmen are capitalizing on the visiting millions. “There should have been a large space for the common man of India to interact with Indian art,” argued Navneet Raman, director of the Kriti Gallery in Varanasi. “No museum has done that. No big gallery has done that. This community of so-called Indian artists feels that they have nothing to gain from it.”

Dan Morrison is a journalist and author of The Black Nile.