Christian Boltanski
In the Blink of an Eye
3 July – 4 October 2015
Opening and performance: 3 July, 6pm
Cricoteka the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor
2-4 Nadwiślańska Street
Krakow
Poland
T +48 12 442 77 70
cricoteka [at] cricoteka.pl
Image: Christian Boltanski, Animitas. Photo: Amparo Irarrázaval. © C. Boltanski.
Curator: Joanna Zielińska
Cricoteka is proud to house a new work by Christian Boltanski. The artist’s site-specific installation features a larger-than-life screening of his new film Animitas in a gallery covered with grass and flowers.
The work will stand as an emotional monument, subjected to the natural process of decay, governed by the diurnal rhythm and responding to the changing time of day and weather. The artist will explore the architectural scope of the Cricoteka building, revealing its glass walls.
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944. He creates films and installations. He started to paint as a teenager and has never attended art school or college. The main medium that he employs is photography. His trademarks are biscuit boxes arranged to resemble unusual archives and monumental works created with clothes. Light and sound play an important role in his works. Found photographs, piles of clothes and recordings of the beating heart (Heart Archive) as well as compilations of objects belonging to various people (the series “Inventory”) represent an absence of the protagonists while simultaneously celebrating individual micro-stories, the focus of Boltanski’s particular attention. The artist works with collective memory, often related to historic events, including the Shoah. He is interested in destruction and the annihilation of matter, which is why he employs vulnerable materials such as photographic paper. Boltanski’s early art was focused on his childhood and on creating his own private mythology. One of the early works involved the recreation in clay of objects that he remembered from his childhood. The art of Tadeusz Kantor had a seminal impact on Boltanski. Both artists share a fascination with the theme of vanitas and the use of objets trouvés to create a story.
