Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est

Introduction by Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins. Essays by Chantal Akerman, Catherine David, and Michael Tarantino. 

Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est is the summation of a multifaceted project that began in Boston when Kathy Halbreich, then Beal curator of Contemporary Art at the museum of fine Arts, and Susan Dowling, producer for WGBH Television, along with independent critic and curator Michael Tarantino, approached Akerman with the idea of creating a multimedia installation focusing on the coming together of the European community. While Akerman was immediately attracted to this project, seeing it as an opportunity to make a work "in many languages", she proposed a look at what was left out of this union as well, and at the concomitant rise if nationalism and anti-Semitism. With the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, her response now seems prescient. In the spring of 1991, the project moved to the Walker Art Center

Akerman's feature film D'Est, a quasi-documentary film that captures in a series of static and moving images the passage from summer to winter across Germany, Poland, and Russia was completed in 1993 and served as a central component to the installation at the Walker. 

• Published by Walker Art Center, 1995

• Softcover, 5.5 x 8.5 inches

• 92 pages