French artist Christian Boltanski, undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the present time, pursues a kind of tracking procedure in his impressive installations, where props typical of memory – old clothing, documents, photographs, toys – reconstruct a destiny and allow the creation of an identity. These fragmentary biographies always refer to temporality and death, absence and loss. Our touching Edition Hatje Cantz consists of two portrait collages, typical of Boltanski’s work, which are, however, made up of strips of old photographs of different people. Those portrayed appear familiar, but are nevertheless fictional characters put together out of condensed layers, whose mysterious fragments do not reveal their history.
