Christian Boltanski

4 channel video installation, sound, continuous loop Dimensions variable

A crowd, seen from the back, slowly disappears. Boltanski created this work for the exhibition "Faire son temps" (Life in the making) at Centre Pompidou.

On his search to find an answer to the question of destiny, Boltanski travelled to the north of Patagonia, where whales gather at certain periods of the year. Legend has it that whales harbour the secrets of the universe. With the help of acoustic enginners, he installed horns that are specially designed to capture the wind and emit sounds very similar to whale song. These sound objects are located in the desert and destined to disappear ; only the tale will remain behind. The screens bring together three concepts : questioning (the whales), emptiness (the lack of a response), and the image of death (the carcass).

Boltanski created "Animitas" in the Atacama Desert, a location steeped in history. The title of the work comes from the name given by Chileans to the religious altars erected on roadsides to mark the spot where an accident occurred. Tiny bells attached to long rods sway and tinkle in the wind. The artist produced three other "Animitas", in locations that are symbolic to him : the north of Quebec, the Dead Sea and the Island of Teshima.

Initially created in the form of an installation in the Atacama Desert in Chile, Animitas pays homage to memorial altars. Filmed in a single static shot from sunrise to sunset, with a ground-level view of an expanse of fresh flowers, the work captures the sound of 800 small Japanese bells, chiming in the wind. Fixed to the ground, they reproduce the map of the stars on the night Boltanski was born. Their chimes evoke the “music of the stars and the voice of floating souls”. The same installation was created on the Japanese island of Teshima (La Forêt des murmures, 2016), on the island of Orléans in Quebec (Blanc, 2017) and near the Dead Sea (2017). A major figure on the international art scene, Boltanski has been weaving true and fictional stories together since the 1970s, inspired by individual and collective histories. The theme of memory, the obsession with not allowing people to forget, and the ability to revisit myths are central to his approach.

Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.

From his diary, filmed over ten years, filmmaker Alain Cavalier invites us to a meditation on old age, weakness and death. Made of moments of life, fragments of images, this film composes a mosaic where the spectator is invited to also find his place by himself...

Entre-temps (Between-times) combines photos of Boltanski at different ages. Originally projected in a loop on a plastic curtain for its first exhibition at he Yvon Lambert gallery in 1996, it is presented now on a string curtain. We see the artist age and then returning to the childhood in a never-ending cycle.

Christian Boltanski is one of the greatest contemporary French artists, known the world over. The narrator, who once knew Boltanski, attempts to reassemble the images of a friend he hasn't seen in twenty years. This is the starting point for a kind of investigation in which documents of varying sources are thrown into the file.

A camera surveys an abandoned apartment, while the voiceover describes it inhabited.

This performance was recorded in the presence of an audience. In his act, Boltanski deals with various incidents from his childhood. All the sketches are set in the past, which suggests that most of the characters are no longer alive.

A young woman threatened with expropriation decides to shut herself in her apartment with her two children, until death ensues. Boltanski, following the logic of despair, shows us the unimaginable.

A woman crawls on the floor of an empty room.

Sitting on the floor in a narrow room, a man coughing and spitting blood.

A man at the feet of a seated woman, who looks like a big doll, licking her whole body.

Trimmed photographs taken from different sources such as postcards, newspapers, police registries, and family photo albums, creating a vast art installation, merge Christian Boltanski's everyday life and lost memories.