A laptop screen displays a close-up video call of an older woman with short dark hair and glasses. The laptop sits on a wooden desk cluttered with a packet of cigarettes, an external hard drive, a mobile phone, a notepad, and sunglasses.

Chantal Akerman, 'No Home Movie' Screening

Introduced by Erika Balsom

A rare screening of Chantal Akerman’s film No Home Movie, 2015, with an introduction by film theorist and critic Erika Balsom.

Akerman (b.1950–d.2015) was a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking.  A writer and visual artist as well as a filmmaker, she made over 40 films during her lifetime, and is considered to be one of the most important directors of her generation.

A companion to Akerman’s 2013 memoir My Mother Laughs which documented the final, fragile years of her mother’s life, No Home Movie was also Akerman’s last film before her own death. A solo production, the film is largely composed of semi-surreptitiously filmed vignettes that Akerman created by setting a digital camera on whatever flat surface was available in different corners of her mother’s flat and letting it record.

Selected by artist Katherine Hubbard on the occasion of her exhibition The Great Room, this screening will be specially introduced by Erika Balsom. Both Ackerman’s film and Hubbard’s exhibition emerge from the day-to-day proximity of a mother/daughter relationship. Shifting under the pressure of time, illness and changing identities, the works document periods of familial life in which grief, disorientation and intimacy coexist.

With thanks to BFI Distribution.

Lead Programme Supporters: The Ampersand Foundation and James Lambert. Programme Supporters: The Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust. With additional support from Bella Kesoyan. Studio Voltaire’s Programmes are core funded by The Studio Voltaire Council.

  1. Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels and died in Paris in 2015. 

    Recent solo exhibitions include Eyefilm Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2020); MOCA, Toronto, Canada (2019); Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2018), a retrospective at La Cinemateque Francaise, Paris, France (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Museum for Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2012); a film retrospective at the Vienna Film Festival, Austria (2011); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2009); List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T. Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2008); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2006); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2004); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1995).

  2. Erika Balsom is a reader in film and media studies at King's College London. Her most recent book is The Edges of Cinema: Essays on 21st Century Film Culture, a collection of a decade of criticism published this autumn by Columbia University Press.

  3. Katherine Hubbard (b. 1981, Philadelphia, lives and works in New York). Recent solo exhibitions include The great room, Company Gallery, New York (2023); Avoid glancing blows, Company Gallery, New York (2020); Katherine Hubbard, Higher Pictures, New York (2018); stages, Baxter St. Camera Club of New York, New York (2017); and Bring your own lights, The Kitchen, New York (2016). Group exhibitions include Time Management Techniques, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Ecstatic Land, Marfa Ballroom, Texas (2022); A Collection of Slow Events, The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri (2017); The Artist’s Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2016); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2015). 

    Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is included in the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

    Hubbard is a 2024 Guggenheim fellow in photography and received her MFA in 2010 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently an Associate Professor and MFA Program Faculty Director at Pratt School of Art.

  4. This event will take place in our Event Studio and is seated. If you have any questions or need assistance with your visit, please feel welcome to contact us at +44 (0) 20 7622 1294 or info@studiovoltaire.org. Read Studio Voltaire's full access information here.

  5. Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie (still), 2015. Courtesy of BFI Distribution.

Free, suggested donation £5

Tuesday 1 December 2026, 7–9 pm

Book
An art gallery features multiple framed black-and-white photographs by Katherine Hubbard mounted on freestanding wooden frames. The room has high vaulted ceilings with dark wooden beams and large arched windows at the far end.

Katherine Hubbard
The Great Room

Exhibition

Curator-led Tour: Katherine Hubbard, The Great Room and Bill Walton, A Form Of Honesty

Event