Christian Boltanski

Using a variety of media, Christian Boltanski gave an account of ordinary lives — his own, but also the lives of anonymous people — individual and collective life stories. His work brought buried memories into the open, from the most intimate, personal, ordinary, family memories to the most universal of all, such as the great disasters of history and their impact on humankind. Heaps of clothes, the interplay of light and shade, the projection of images; these were some of the means Boltanski used to preserve 'lesser memories', to express the precariousness of human existence and the fragility of passing time.