Boltanski’s celebrated ‘Monuments’ series crystallizes several core themes at play in his oeuvre. Sacrality, remembrance and childhood translate into altars that transform the exhibition space into a spiritual sanctuary. The series stems from ‘La Composition Occidentale’ (1980) – exhibited in 1984 at Centre Pompidou, Paris – in which small photographs of Christmas ornaments affixed to the wall in the shape of a Christmas tree are lit by small electric lights.

Based on a similar composition, the ‘Monuments’ consist of framed photographs of children's faces mounted on the wall like tiles that converge in a pyramid shape punctuated by simple light bulbs with visible wiring. Through their enlargement and the change in contrast values, the images are reminiscent of newspaper obituaries. These contemplative memorials – the largest exhibition of which was held in 1986 in the Salpêtrière Chapel, Paris – stand for the importance of our collective memory and open up a space of remembrance.

Contrasting with traditional memorials carved in stone, Boltanski’s monuments are crafted from everyday objects scattered across his studio and include glass, adhesive tape, light bulbs and cables. The lightness of his materials alludes to the fragility of memories which only exist as long as one remembers them. Characteristic of Boltanski’s aesthetics since his 1969 exhibition at Daniel Templon Gallery in Paris, a rusted biscuit box appears in ‘Petit Monument Odessa’ (1990); this ambivalent container evokes both childhood memories and a funerary urn, two leitmotivs at the core of the artist’s approach.

Boltanski has been keeping traces of the past since the 1960s, building collections that shape his oeuvre through large installations that compile names, clothes or portraits. Celebrating the memories of the departed, his photographic body of work can be seen as a visual archive of humanity that echoes his ‘Archives du Coeur’. For this ongoing project started in 2008, he records heartbeats of volunteers to later store them on the Naoshima Island in Japan, recalling the lives of the recorded who will one day all be gone. Boltanski’s oeuvre is a tribute to the past, from which only records remain.

‘L’Album photographique de la famille de B.’ consists of enlarged photographs from a family album found at a flea market. First looking for singularities, Boltanski reconstructed its chronological sequence only to find out that this album looks like any family album. The simplicity and everyday nature of these images reveal how our existences are made of ordinary moments; an entire life of mundane sequences that the artist aims at preserving.

The portraits constituting ‘Les Suisses Morts’ were appropriated by Boltanski from obituaries published in Le ‘Nouvelliste du Valais’, a provincial Swiss newspaper. He compiled these clippings over a year, then re-photographed and enlarged the already grainy images. The identity of the subjects is obliterated by the blurry quality of the prints and the removal of any memorial text from the obituary, while the repetitive arrangement of identical elements suggests that the installation is part of an almost infinite archive; Boltanski has indeed produced a number of works bearing variations on the same title with many similar components, where the photographs are either mounted on the wall, on shelves, on tin boxes or on clothes.

In Boltanski’s vision the departed not only embody loss, their tragic destiny also stands for fate in a wider sense. At the 2011 Venice Biennale he proposed ‘Chance’ for the French Pavilion. Infused with a joyful optimism, the installation – based on photographs of new-borns – focuses on the existential dualism between determinism and free will. Hundreds of baby portraits are printed on a large moving walkway that runs at high speed throughout the building. Every eight minutes the film stops on the face of a baby, asking whether they will follow a predetermined path or rule their own lives.

Christian Boltanski (*1944) lives and works in Malakoff near Paris. He is one of the most well-known artists of our time, whose work has been recognised internationally with the Praemium Imperiale (2006) and in comprehensive retrospectives, most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2019–20). His works are part of institutional collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; ARCO Foundation Collection, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hara Museum, Tokyo; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; MuHKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, and many more.