LEUVEN.- STUK presents the work of internationally renowned artist and filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (b. 1965). Through a lens-based practice spanning narrative and experimental filmmaking, video and installation art, photography and writing, Subrin has repeatedly returned to questions of women’s representation and its tangled relationship with broader social and political forces. In this first solo exhibition in Belgium, she brings together one of her bodies of research and work related to the figure of French actress Maria Schneider (1952–2011): The Listening Takes (2023-2025), Manal Issa, 2024 (2025), Sweet Ruin (2008) and For Maria (2019). A long-term investigation into the resonant challenges and possibilities of depicting a subject, this series of projects deploy a wide range of strategies to explore the complex problems and possibilities of biography, making a case for subjectivity, multiplicity, and cross-historical, cross-genre forms and identities.
The exhibition is centered around an immersive multi-channel sound and video installation, The Listening Takes (2023-2025), a sculptural version of Subrin’s 2022 short film Maria Schneider, 1983. Featuring actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval, The Listening Takes presents three reenactments of a 1983 interview with Maria Schneider for the French TV program Cinéma cinémas – a brief but controversial interview in which the actress was forced to confront the traumatic experience she endured on the set of Last Tango in Paris (1972). Through a complex sonic interplay, the large-scale three-channel video installation presents a collective, cross-historical, intersectional portrait of actresses reckoning with consent, representation, and trauma.
Shot in Beirut in September 2024, Manal Issa, 2024 (2025), presents a fourth reenactment. In it, we hear Issa’s voice answering the same questions Schneider was asked. This time, however, she speaks her own voice, redirecting Schneider’s answers to a broader j’accuse towards Western patriarchal and capitalist cinema. In addition, the film stands as a powerful consideration of the role of the actor during unfolding global conflict.
The exhibition then invites you into the more intimate rooms, continuing Subrin’s work on archival material with a screening of Sweet Ruin (2008), an experimental adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized script Tecnicamente dolce (Technically Sweet), written in the late '60s but never produced. The project was to star Jack Nicholson as T., a disillusioned journalist obsessed with guns, and Maria Schneider as “The Girl”. In two screens paralleling the dual plots of his script, Sweet Ruin imagines the ruins of Antonioni's work, as if somehow actually filmed, but then lost and forgotten. Reclaiming and reinterpreting the original script, Subrin explores the psychological and gendered dynamics of relationships by blurring the lines between interiorized and externalized states of being, and casting actress Gaby Hoffmann in both the Nicholson and Schneider roles. A rarely shown one minute mash-up film For Maria (2019) and a curated selection of research materials complete Subrin’s solo show in STUK.
All in all, How We Find Her is a testimony to Subrin’s long-standing deployment and deconstruction of biographical forms to expose the limitations of the quest for an ‘official record’, and the absences and erasures it often produces. It is equally an invitation to question what positions we can take with our voices today - whether addressing genocide, sexual assault or other injustice - and reckoning with the consequences of speaking up.
The exhibition How We Find Her is part of a series of solo exhibitions in STUK by contemporary visual artists who have a particular affinity for the moving image. Previous exhibitions include Saodat Ismailova - Her Journeys, Her Lives; Raven Chacon-Rift Variations: Collaborative Video Works; Liz Magic Laser-Convulsive States; Ben Rivers-It’s About Time; Helen Cammock-Beneath the Surface of Skin; Mircea Cantor-Am I really free?; Angela Washko-Point of View; Sebastián Díaz Morales-Talk with Dust; Mika Taanila-The End; Nevin Aladağ-Rollin’; Omer Fast-Appendix; Joachim Koester-Maybe this act, this work, this thing; Emre Hüner-Neochronophobiq; John Akomfrah-Auto Da Fé; and Bjørn Melhus-The Theory of Freedom.
Elisabeth Subrin
b. 1965, Boston, MA, United States
Elisabeth Subrin is a New York-based filmmaker, writer and visual artist who creates works in film, video, photography, and installation. Her critically acclaimed projects explore the intersection between cultural history and subjectivity, through a feminist lens. Known for her use of reenactment, Subrin’s films and video installations have been featured in numerous festivals and exhibitions both in the US and internationally, including solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Vienna Viennale. Subrin’s 2016 award-winning feature narrative, A Woman, A Part, had its world premiere in the Tiger competition at The Rotterdam International Film Festival and traveled to festivals throughout Europe, US and Asia. Her 2022 award-winning short film, Maria Schneider, 1983, starring Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval, had its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes International Film Festival in Director’s Fortnight and North American premiere at The 60th New York Film Festival in 2022. It received a 2023 César for Best Documentary Short. The Listening Takes was commissioned by David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Providence, RI in 2023 and was presented in a new version in Participant Inc in New York in 2025. Subrin received a BFA in Film from the Massachusetts College of Art and a MFA in Video from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Subrin was a 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar in France at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.
Works in the exhibition:
The Listening Takes, 2023–2025, 30 minutes, 3-channel, 16mm/HD video, 9-channel sound & speakers.
Originally commissioned by Lia Gangitano, Participant Inc and Kate Kraczon, Brown Arts Institute (BAI) / David Winton Bell Gallery (The Bell)
Manal Issa, 2024, 2025, 10 minutes, HD video, sound & headphones
Sweet Ruin, 2008, 10 minutes, 2-channel video projection, 16mm to HD, sound & headphones
For Maria, 2019, 1 minutes, HD video, sound & headphones
Selection of research materials
Curator: Karen Verschooren — STUK
