Christian Boltanski

In 2005 Christian Boltanski created an illustration entitled Le coeur. Within it a light bulb pulsated to the rhythm of the artist's recorded heartbeat, plunging us into a perpetual movement between light and dark, life and death. With Les Archives du Coeur, Boltanski has extended this earlier work. Interested in what he calls the 'little memory... the contrary to the Memory with a capital M that is preserved in history books,' he reminds us that it is this 'which makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and disappears with death.' In pursuit of these ephemeral histories, the artist invites visitors to record their own heartbeats, which will be added to a growing library, or corpus, of sounds. Three copies of each recording will be preserved. One will be houses on the island of Teshima in the Sea of Japan, where the artist is building a permanent installation of the heart beats. Another will be kept in the centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle and the third i for the visitor who took part in the project. The process of collection intersects with two of Boltanski's fundamental preoccupations: the increasingly autobiographical aspect of his work, which centres on his own mortality, and his interests in the transformation of the 'most personal to the most collective'. As he noted in conversation with Catherine Grenier
'The artist is someone who has a mirror instead of a face.'