Christian Boltanski - Ephémères review: A wondrous mix of beauty and brutality

1/4
Ben Luke25 April 2018

Before seeing Christian Boltanski’s latest show, I read — ashamed— about a whale off the Spanish coast, killed by the 29kg of rubbish in its belly.

Soon after, art and life collided as I watched Boltanski’s three-screen video installation Misterios (Mysteries), shot in Bahía Bustamante, an uninhabited Patagonian region, where whales visit in autumn. The three still shots feature a whale skeleton, a stretch of sea looking to a horizon, and three human-made horns, shaped like missile tails, which harness winds to create sounds resembling cetacean screeches.

Boltanski imagines Misterios as an enigmatic vestige of himself, the man who talked to whales. Now 73, he’s discussed transcending death. But, with that poor whale haunting me, the work conjured a more collective after: a landscape in the wake of environmental catastrophe, accompanied by plaintive cries.

Boltanski repeatedly pulls together personal memory with political events. In Animatas (Small Souls), he maps the constellation of stars on his birth date with bells on rods in the Chilean desert. They tinkle in the breeze yet evoke loss, shrines to the disappeared in Pinochet’s Chile. Once again, Boltanski proves himself a master in distilling complex ideas into simple, poetic forms.

Until May 12

15 exhibitions to look forward to in 2018

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