Heartbeats : Christian Boltanski

Baró Galeria is pleased to announce Heartbeats, the first exhibition by French artist Christian Boltanski in a gallery in Latin America. The show, scheduled to open on August 1, 2015, consists of a single immersive installation that will occupy the ground floor of the gallery space in Jardins, São Paulo.

The installation is an adaptation of the “work in progress” Les Archives du Coeur (The Heart Archives) that, since 2005, has been touring various art institutions collecting heartbeats from audiences around the world. The work—a kind of universal existential record, according to the artist himself—takes shape as these public recordings are added to his permanent archive, installed on the remote Japanese island of Teshima.

In Heartbeats, the process is reversed: instead of collecting the visitors’ heartbeats, Boltanski shares his own. Through amplifiers, the sounds resonate throughout the space, inviting the public to immerse themselves in the artist’s heart. The heart, commonly associated with the symbol of life, is presented here as a common link while also embodying the uniqueness of all beings. Archives and directories have been a fascination of the artist since the 1960s. For Boltanski, they represent great paradoxes: while on one hand they are a powerful and precious way to reclaim what has been lost, on the other, they are subject to limitations and untruths. From them, his works inspire reflections on death, the passage of time, and the struggle to preserve “small emotional memories.” For him, these memories stand in contrast to those recorded in history books, as they are the great collectors of the particularities of human experiences.