Christian Boltanski: Dopo

From November 3, 2015, the Fondazione Merz presents Christian Boltanski. Dopo, a solo exhibition of the French artist’s work, curated by Claudia Gioia.
Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944), one of the great interpreters of contemporary life, displays his work for the first time in Turin with a new, site-specific project inspired by the city’s social and cultural history.
The exhibit unfolds inside the Fondazione gallery spaces and is conceived as a total installation, a choral narrative addressing individual and collective memory, entwining the past with the present, urging unattended promises, recombining History with each individual’s life.

Boltanski’s subject matters are History and life duration. Vulnerability is his strength, and reflecting upon absence is his way to express his passion for what is real. And so Boltanski builds his own archives, moves shadows around the gallery space, or brings forgotten memories back to the surface through the eyes and faces of strangers that emerge from found photographs; he synchronizes the sound of the human heartbeat to the rhythm of history; he creates settings with old clothing so that individual stories may not be dispersed; he investigates fate and challenges, through irony, the transience of things to propose the art of time.

Accompanying the exhibition is a publication featuring images of Christian Boltanski’s works and installations displayed at the Fondazione Merz, the curator’s interview with the artist, and an essay by philosopher Massimo Donà.