Smith and Harmsen met at a Chantal Akerman film screening in 2016. Since this first meeting the two have shared an interest in the late director’s work and the relationship between moving image, painting, and the experience of time passing. This episode sits alongside their collaborative exhibitionThe empty room feels bigger , and continues this discussion, drawing influence from Akerman’s characteristic long takes and the psychological interiority of her films.
Smith has painted several watercolours on linen after Akerman’s 1996 one and only romantic comedy, A Couch In New York, starring Juliette Binoche (b. Paris 1964) and William Hurt (b. Washington D.C. 1950 - Portland 2022). Beatrice, a dancer from Paris, swaps her colourful, cluttered, Belleville apartment for psychiatrist Henry’s vast, sparse, designer apartment on New York’s upper east side. Both find themselves immersed in the other’s life, the paintings show Henry lying on Beatrice’s attic bedroom reading letters from her myriad of lovers, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Beatrice psychoanalyses Henry’s patients.
Harmsen’s work takes influence from Akerman with a video installation that is part road movie and part room film (a description often given to Akerman’s oeuvre). Rests are moving silences brings together footage from the last fifteen years of the artist's own archive. Long distances travels and intimate interior spaces are woven together in a narrative on the relationship between the fleeting moment and it's transferal into the filmed - an exploration in the digitisation of film and how it gives easy access to the illusion of the frozen frame of the celluloid strip and the heavy presence of passing time and mortality associated with the still image.
