MGW Collection: Christian Boltanski "Ghosts of Warsaw" (Les Fantômes de Varsovie), 2001

Boltanski proposed a 24-hour, lifelong live broadcast from his studio directly to Walsh's Tasmanian cave. In return, the millionaire agreed to a high fee, paid to the artist in monthly installments. If he died before eight years, the recorded material would become Walsh's property, at a price below the agreed-upon amount. If he lived longer than eight years, the work would be more expensive, corresponding to his lifespan. Boltanski was 65 at the time, and The Life of CB project had the flavor of a "Faustian pact." However, the intended effect of this "selling of the soul to the devil" was an extraordinary record of the life of an artist whose work explored themes of death, transience, and the impermanence of memory.

Boltanski's conceptual art is best defined by the concept of intermediality, or activities realized using various media and across diverse creative fields. Born in 1944, the French artist – one of the most important creators of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries – had no artistic training, and the painting he practiced in his youth was quickly replaced by photography as the dominant medium in his work. He created spectacular installations and ephemeral works, utilizing everyday objects ( objet trouvé ), documents, photographs, and items found at flea markets, newspaper photos, light, and sound. The intended effect was to create a reception akin to a theatrical experience – entering the space of a work of art, which the artist could fill an entire room with. He also readily exhibited his works outside galleries and museums – in public spaces, such as churches. The sacred element was important in his work, although not driven by religious motives. Boltanski was interested in the theme of vanitas – vanity, the transience of life – which has been present in art for centuries. For him, this also meant the transience of memory. Therefore, in his works, whose "mortality" he inscribed into the creative process, he sought to restore memory—of himself, his childhood, and of people, including those unknown, anonymous, and forgotten. He "sanctified" their lives, if only for a moment, through art.

For the artist, the most important thing was the moment the viewer encounters the work, moving it and leaving it in their memory. Memory that ends with death. Christian Boltanski's archives served to preserve this memory – made of biscuit boxes, photos of anonymous individuals, clothing, the sound of beating hearts. This latest project, Les Archives du Cœur (Archives of Hearts, 2005), consists of recordings of the heartbeats of tens of thousands of people, ultimately located in a kind of library on Teshima Island in Japan. Clothing is also a recurring motif in many installations (even tons of clothing, as in the "Personnes" exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010), rightly evoking associations with Nazi death camps. References to the tragedy of the Holocaust recurred repeatedly in the Frenchman's work, a direct result of the wartime experiences of his loved ones. The artist came from a Parisian intelligentsia family. His father, Étienne Alexandre Boltanski, was a doctor, a Jew, and an emigrant from Ukraine; his mother, the writer Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin, was Corsican and Catholic. His father avoided deportation to a death camp by faking a divorce in 1942 and fleeing to the so-called unoccupied zone ( zone libre ). In reality, he hid in the Boltanskis' Parisian apartment for a year and a half, hiding under the floorboards. The danger of exposure increased when his wife became pregnant. Christian was born on September 6th, just after the liberation of Paris, but the war and the Holocaust were the main topics of conversation in the family home as a child. This shaped Boltanski's sensibility and guided his thinking as an artist. Photography, by its very nature, captures fleeting moments, serving as a testament to the past and a tool for memory, is the medium closest to this sensibility. In his works, he evoked, among other things, the faces of Jews, thus encouraging reflection on their fate and history. In this way, he blurred the boundary between individual and collective memory; he made private experience universal.

This group of works by Christian Boltanski also includes the work "Ghosts of Warsaw ," which is part of the collection of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. The artist created it specifically for his retrospective exhibition, "Revenir," curated by Milada Ślizińska at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2001 (then titled " Les Habitants de Varsovie "). The installation consists of metal frames and spotlit prints of black-and-white photographs depicting the faces of prewar Jewish residents of Warsaw. The work was accompanied by an advertisement in a special supplement to "Gazeta Wyborcza," designed by Boltanski: "These people lived in Warsaw in 1937. If you recognize anyone, please contact us." The work's message was reinforced by the Witness project, which consisted of 40 billboards placed throughout the city, showing only enlargements of the eyes of the work's unnamed subjects. In this way, the artist drew attention to the lack of historical traces of Jewish presence in Warsaw's urban fabric, a testament to the wartime tragedy of the Jewish community and the Holocaust. In this context, Ghosts of Warsaw is a crucial work, created to restore the memory of those who shaped this city but who often became anonymous victims of the "Nazi death machine."

Boltanski had a special connection with Poland, not least because his name "sounds more or less normal" here. He debuted on the art scene in the late 50s, exhibited worldwide, and his works are included in the collections of major art institutions (Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Gallery in London). He first showed his work in Warsaw in 1978 at the Foksal Gallery, where he befriended the community around that venue. He was close to Tadeusz Kantor, also because of the similar themes and aesthetics of their art. In 2011, he paid tribute to his late colleague by creating the exhibition-installation "In the Blink of an Eye" at the Cricoteka in Krakow. He covered the floor with grass and cut flowers, which were subject to natural decay during the show, while three clocks counted down the lives of Kantor, Boltanski, and curator Joanna Zielińska. The artist's last exhibition – now posthumous – took place in 2022 at the OP ENHEIM gallery in Wrocław and featured works he gave as a gift to his life partner, the Polish artist Angelika Markul. Milada Ślizińska, the artist's friend and curator of the 6 septembre homage à Christian Boltanski , said of the exhibition: "This exhibition is minimalist and very intimate, moving and revealing of human sensitivity. The great themes the artist discusses meet the banality of the objects he uses in his art. Boltanski once said that an artist has no direct influence on anything. He can only ask questions and evoke feelings."

Christian Boltanski died on July 14, 2021, at the age of 76. His bet with David Walsh was undisputed, and the broadcast from the artist's studio was cut off three days later. A record remains – a document of the last twelve years of his life and work, which has become part of the Australian artist's collection. Boltanski perversely ensured that his memory is preserved. As he said in an interview, "I've spent my entire life trying to fight the fact of dying and being forgotten. Although, in reality, it's completely impossible." Yet, in his art, he demonstrated both the impermanence of memory and the ways to preserve it. The ghosts of the past, if only for a moment, became part of the collective memory, because "the beautiful thing about being an artist is that you tell the story of your own village, but it becomes everyone's village."