This screening has been guest curated by the artist Renèe Helèna Browne, whose work features with the Staying with the Trouble exhibition, running in the Main Galleries at IMMA until 21 September 2025. The exhibition Staying with the Trouble is inspired by author and philosopher Donna Haraway’s seminal work of the same name, and features over forty contemporary artists whose diverse practices explore urgent themes of our time.
Browne’s screening for Living Canvas brings together Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976), Emily Jacir’s letter to a friend (2019), and Tako Taal’s Departures (2021), three works that resonate deeply with themes Browne explores in their own practice, and particularly in their most recent film Sanctus! (2024). Each film meditates on absence, memory, and the landscapes shaped by grief, longing, and distance.
In News from Home, Akerman’s voice recites letters from her mother over drifting shots of New York, creating a portrait of emotional distance and diasporic tension. The city becomes a terrain of quiet estrangement, where presence and absence blur. Jacir’s letter to a friend similarly grounds itself in correspondence: a series of letters written from Bethlehem, Palestine, in 2001, mapping the everyday within occupied space. Through fragments of text and image, the work offers intimacy amid rupture, making visible the traces of displacement, surveillance, and resistance. Taal’sDepartures turns to grief as a sensory phenomenon, expressed through fleeting gestures, ruptured sound, and layered time. The film creates an atmosphere of intimate mourning, where memory appears as shadow, echo, and afterimage.
Browne selected these works for the ways they speak to their own ongoing interest in devotion, familial memory, and loss. Together, the films’ quiet precision and emotional depth reflect a shared commitment to storytelling, one that honours what cannot be fully seen, spoken, or reclaimed.
Films in order of appearance:
Chantal Akerman, News From Home, 1976 1 hour 29:13 minutes
Emily Jacir, letter to a friend, 2019 43 minutes
Tako Taal, Departures, 2021 3:49 minutes
About the films:
Chantal Akerman
News From Home, 1976
Duration 1 hour 29:13 minutes
When a 21-year-old Chantal Akerman first moved to New York in the early 70s, her mother wrote her letters containing both maternal worries and pride, as well as the minutiae of life back home in Belgium. Returning to the city in 1976, Akerman reads these mother-to-daughter letters aloud against a backdrop of shots of Manhattan and a soundtrack of beeping cars and rumbling subway trains. The result is a mesmerising reflection on the raw, thrilling loneliness of the city and the intimate, often banal, warmth of the family home.
About the artist:
Chantal Anne Akerman (June 6, 1950 – October 5, 2015) was a Belgian film director, artist and professor of film at the City College of New York. Her best-known film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Despite being categorised as such by others, Akerman frequently distanced herself from the feminist label, explaining, “when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves”. Instead, Akerman acknowledged that her cinematic approach took inspiration from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as from filmmakers Michael Snow and Jean-Luc Godard. Many directors have cited Akerman’s directorial style as an influence on their work. Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.
Emily Jacir
letter to a friend, 2019
Digital; Palestine; 43 minutes
In letter to a friend (2019), artist Emily Jacir writes to Eyal Weizmann (Founding Director of Forensic Architecture) to start an investigation before an inevitable act occurs. Interlacing images, textures, movements, traces, and sounds from over a century, letter to a friend recounts in minute detail a home and street in Bethlehem. Today, this house is the home of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art & Research. On the night of May 15th, Israeli soldiers entered the Center, raided the building and caused significant damage. Among other things, phones, computers, hard drives and cameras were taken from the premises. Earlier, the Center’s garden and its urban farm had been destroyed by a fire. No people were hurt, but nevertheless the damage done is extensive. Employees and supporters of the Center have started rebuilding amidst the current difficult situation in Palestine.
By streaming letter to a friend you can support the work of the Center. Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art & Research is an independent artist-run space located in Bethlehem. It is renowned for its work in the arts, and is devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural activities. It is an experimental learning hub for the Bethlehem community and beyond. The Center’s building is of historical importance, having been built in 1880 as a family home.
About the artist:
Emily Jacir is an artist and educator active in the Mediterranean region. Her work focuses on themes of transformation, translation, resistance, and the exploration of silenced historical narratives. She uses a wide range of media and methodologies including film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, performance and archival research to investigate personal and collective movement through public space and its implications for the physical and social experience of transmediterranean space and time. For the last twenty years, she has been working in southern Italy, primarily in Salento but also in Basilicata and Sicily. Her most recent work, We Ate the Wind, features a large cinematic installation that combines new and archival material, addressing questions of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, hospitality and exclusion, exploring specific migration policies and their consequences on individuals and communities. Drawing on rituals such as dances, processions and games, the artist charts the way space, collectivity and memories are claimed.
Emily Jacir has received significant recognition and awards, including: Golden Lion, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); Prince Claus Award, The Hague (2007); Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum (2008); Alpert Award, Herb Alpert Foundation (2011); Rome Prize Fellowship — Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Rome (2015); Arts and Letters Awards in Art — American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2023); and an honorary doctorate — NCAD, Dublin.
Her solo exhibitions include those at: OTO SOUND MUSEUM (2024); MCBA — Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2023); Bozar, Brussels (2023); Space 204, Nashville (2022); Galleria Peola Simondi, Turin (2021, 2013, 2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016–17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat al Funun, Amman (2014–2015); Beiru t Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009).
Her group exhibitions include: 32 Bienal de Pontevedra (2025); Moderna Museet, Stoccolma (2025); 60th Venice Biennale — Collateral Event, Venice (2024); MoMA, New York (2023); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2020); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2018); documenta, Kassel (2017, 2012). Jacir is the founder of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.
Tako Taal
Departures, 2021
16mm transfer to digital; 3 minutes 49 seconds
Tako Taal’s Departures, a moving image work filmed in 16mm, is a tender remembrance, mapping grief and its mutations across temporalities and geographies. A poem, written by one brother, is read aloud by two of the brothers that survive him. As their voices loop and join from across the globe, a camera traces the stitches, stains and folds of traditional textiles from their homeland. The textual responds to and is reproduced by the textile. Patterns scale in complexity and converge to form a whole. Folds and stitches in a patchwork fabric chart a topography of migration and lineage across oceans and generations, figuring departure as a branching, the tributaries of a river.
About the artist:
Tako Taal is an artist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work has been shown at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), CAPC (Bordeaux), Tramway (Glasgow), Workplace Foundation (Newcastle), Pace Gallery (London), Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee), Jerwood Arts (London), Site Gallery (Sheffield), NADA House (New York), Talbot Rice Gallery (Edinburgh).
About the guest curator:
Renèe Helèna Browne is an Irish artist working across film, drawing, and spoken word. Their practice explores lived experiences of rurality, labour, and religion, shaped by growing up in the North West of Ireland. Through storytelling and the gendered body, Browne interrogates the legacies of these contexts in intimate and mythic terms. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions and screenings at Oakville Galleries (Oakville, Canada), Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Edinburgh Art Festival 2024, Bahia Independent Film Festival (Brazil), Project Arts Centre with aemi and Cinenova (Dublin), Freelands Foundation (London), Talbot Rice Gallery (Edinburgh), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), LUX Scotland, David Dale Gallery at P/////AKT Amsterdam, the European Media Art Festival No. 34, TULCA Visual Art Festival (Galway), bff/Docs Ireland, and Rua das Gaivotas (Lisbon). They were awarded the Salzburger Kunstverein Sunset Kino Award 2021 for excellence in contemporary film. Browne’s work is represented in public collections of The Arts Council and the University of Edinburgh Art Collection
