TRACES: Christian Boltanski
Today is the occasion to bear in mind Christian Boltanski (6/9/1944-14/7/2021), he is known for a body of work that may be considered a disturbing archive of our social, cultural, ethnic, and personal histories. Christian Boltanski’s work over the past 40 years has focused in different ways on the notion of individual identity, on the ways in which we strive to create and maintain it, and the degree to which it is lost in the midst of collective experience. Archiving, and our obsession with recording and classifying our own lives and those of others, is another recurrent theme. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…
By Dimitris Lempesis
Christian Boltanski’s mother was Corsican and his father Jewish. Under the Occupation of France, his father spent much of the time beneath the floorboards in the family home, and Boltanski was perhaps conceived there. He was 11 when he left school, 18 before he left the house unaccompanied. Some of the stories Boltanski has told of his early life are indeed strange, some of them are true. Boltanski has also claimed: “I no longer have any childhood memories. I have erased them by inventing so many false memories”. Self-taught, he began painting in 1958 but first came to public attention in the late ‘60s with short Avant-Garde films and with the publication of notebooks in which he came to terms with his childhood. The combination in these works of real and fictional evidence of his and other people’s existence remained central to his later art. In the ‘70s photography became Boltanski’s favoured medium for exploring forms of remembering and consciousness, reconstructed in pictorial terms. In the early ‘80s Boltanski ceased using objets trouvés as a point of departure. Instead he produced theatrical compositions by fashioning small marionette-like figures from cardboard, scraps of materials, thread and cork, painted in colour and transposed photographically into large picture formats. These led to kinetic installations in which a strong light focused on figurative shapes helped create a mysterious environment of silhouettes in movement. In 1986 Boltanski began making installations from a variety of materials and media, with light effects as integral components. Such works, for which he used portrait photographs of Jewish schoolchildren taken in Vienna in 1931, serve as a forceful reminder of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. In the works that followed Boltanski filled whole rooms and corridors with items of worn clothing as a way of prompting an involuntary association with the clothing depots at concentration camps. As in his previous work, objects thus serve as mute testimony to human experience and suffering.His work, “Monument (Odessa)”, uses six photographs of Jewish students in 1939 and lights to resemble Yahrzeit candles to honor and remember the dead. His enormous installation titled “No Man’s Land” (2010) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is a great example of how his constructions and installations trace the lives of the lost and forgotten. 
