ART AND HUMAN RIGHTS:
WITNESSING TO SILENCE

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI

Drill Hall Gallery

Christian Boltanski was born in France in 1944 to a Corsican mother and a Jewish father, and presently lives and works in Malakoff, a suburb of Paris. With no formal art training, Boltanski began painting as a teenager and has since gained an enormous international reputation. Since the late 1960s his work has usually taken the form of photographic and filmic installations that explore the themes of memory, identity, absence, death and loss, often using a combination of documentary and fictive materials. Boltanski has exhibited in Documenta (1972, 1986), the Venice Biennale (1993, 1996), and at the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburg (1991).

Drawing on the power of objects of human attachment to evoke memory, and the role of the photographic image in particular, Boltanski explores the transient nature of life alongside the longevity of historical memory. Often intentionally blurring the distinction between discourses of truth and fiction offered by photographs and other human relics, some of Boltanski's most moving and provocative works have addressed the tragedies surrounding the World Wars of the twentieth century and in particular, the Holocaust. In these, the artist offers personal histories of tragedy which reveal photography's relationship to experiences of memory, loss, and mourning, as well as its use in claims of truth. In addition Boltanski's work can be seen as a challenging attempt to reconstruct history and collective memory. Commenting on his artistic motivations, Boltanksi says, 'What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly. I made a large work called The Archive of Dead Swiss (1990) and all the people in photographs in the work are dead. We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them. Human. That's all we can say. Everyone is unique and important.'

Christian Boltanski
Contacts 2002
8 light boxes with photographs
130 x 95 x 12 cmÝ
Image courtesy Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris

© Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003

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Last Modified: Fri, 06 Jun 2003