Les Archives du Coeur (The Heart Archive) invites visitors to contribute a recording of their heartbeat to the artist’s archive, within a specially designed booth. The resulting audio file is then added to Boltanski’s ongoing collection, which is housed on the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima.

Boltanski is fascinated by the singularity of human experiences and the ephemerality of human life.

‘I am interested in what I call ‘little memory’, an emotional memory, an everyday knowledge, the contrary of the Memory with a capital M that is preserved in history books”, he says. “this little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death. The loss of identity, this equalisation in forgetting, is very difficult to accept.’

Biography

Christian Boltanski was a sculptor, photographer, painter, and filmmaker born in 1944 in Paris, France. He died in Paris in 2021. Boltanski’s childhood was marked by the post-war era and the Holocaust; his Ukrainian Jewish heritage, knowledge about his parents wartime experiences, and his own early memories impacted him significantly. Aged 12, Boltanski left school, began to paint and was focused on the ambition of becoming an artist. In the 1960s he began to develop a “personal ethnology” marked, among others, by the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harald Szeemann. At the same time, drawing on museology, Boltanski exhibited inventories of items of anonymous owners. Boltanski’s work frequently uses objects (photos, pieces of clothing, bells, flowers) give voice to absent subjects and are an invitation to the viewer to meditate and contemplate.

Since his first exhibition at LeRanelagh cinema (1968) Boltanski’s work has been shown in numerous countries. Recent solo shows include at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, Japan (2019); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan and the National Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2019); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2018); The Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2018); the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (2017). He was recognised with several awards during his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale Award (2006) and the Kaiser Ring Award (2001). He participated in Documenta (1977 and 1972) and numerous Venice Biennales (2011, 1995, 1993, 1980, and 1975).

‘What I try to do with my work is to ask questions, talk about philosophical things, not through stories with words, but stories through visual images. I talk about actually very simple things, common to all. I don’t talk about complicated things. What I’m trying to do is to remind people to forget that it’s art and think about it as life.’