Christian Boltanski – Moved
Memory and transience are Christian Boltanski’s (born 1944 in Paris) major themes. Like no other artist in the international context, he has worked for decades on the connection between life and death—the disappearance of the individual and the desperate human endeavors against forgetting and being forgotten. Death increasingly appears at the center of Boltanski’s oeuvre, broaching in the process the theme of his own person and the time he still has to live. The large installation he developed especially for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, along with the accompanying pieces, goes to the heart of this subject, which is still a taboo in our society, granting it a quiet urgency and dignity. The exhibition Moved is focused on an outsized installation entitled Spirit(s) that incorporates mechanical motion. In this piece, Boltanski precedes from his monumental installations Personnes from 2010 in the Grand Palais in Paris and Chance in the French Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The exhibition Moved in the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is the most extensive show of Christian Boltanski’s works in Northern Germany in 20 years.