Born in 1944 in Paris, self-taught, Christian Boltanski painted until the end of the 1960s. In 1968 he created the work he considers the foundation of all of his subsequent artistic exploration : the artist's book Recherche et présentation de tout de qui reste de mon enfance, 1944-1950 ("Research and Presentation of All that Remains of My Childhood, 1944-1950"). From that moment the artist played with autobiographical codes and re-created his childhood's objects or situations that he presented in books, display cases, biscuit tins, or even distributed in mailings. In this way were created works with evocative titles : La Reconstitution d’un accident qui ne m’est pas encore arrivé et où j’ai trouvé la mort ("The Re-Creation of an Accident Which Hasn't Happened To Me Yet and In Which I Died") (1969), Essai de reconstitution d’objets ayant appartenus à Christian Boltanski entre 1948 et 1954 ("Test Re-Creation of Objects Having Belonged to Christian Boltanski between 1948 in 1954") (1970), etc. From 1970 to 1973 he created Vitrines de références ("Reference Display Cases"), altering museographic codes : miscellaneous objects, found or made by the artist, were exhibited in display cases, like itemized tokens from an ordinary life of which remained only virtually absurd traces.

In 1972, L'album de la famille D. ("The D. Family Album"), presented at the Kassel Documenta, launched his international career. In this photographic installation, based on his friend Michel Durand's family album, and similar to the photographs of 62 membres du Club Mickey in 1955 ("62 Members of the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955") (1972), or of Images d'une année de faits divers ("Images from a Year of Minor News Items") (1973), the artist used found images which he enlarged, framed and organized into mural compositions. The two artists with whom he claimed fraternity were Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. At the same time, the Inventaires ("Inventories") were installations in the neutral manner of ethnological presentations, using an anonymous person's entire furniture and personal objects.

After the more ironic and grotesque break of the Saynètes comiques ("Comic Sketches"), 1974, in which he staged himself clownishly, miming scenes from his childhood, he became more distant and impersonal in Images modèles ("Model Image") (from 1975), his own photographs in accordance with "beautiful photography" standards. His photographic installations made him one of the main founders of photographic visual art, and his work on "average taste" anticipate post-conceptual artistic developments. From 1977 he created the Compositions (which he categorized as heroic, grotesque, architectural, Japanese, enchanted, etc.), photographs of massive proportions inspired by painting dimensions, which reproduced on a black background small objects he found or made. The enlargement of these objects to a monumental scale, to show them derisively, made apparent the continually overblown importance we all give to fleeting and fragile things.

From 1984 he broke with his photographic tableaux to return to works closer in spirit to his early creative work. The various series – Ombres ("Shadows"), Monuments, Reliquaires ("Reliquaries") and Réserves ("Reserves") - took on an ever darker tone. The materials of his early works – found photographs and biscuit tins – were reused for dramatic installations, haunted by the idea of death. From this period the Shoah became a preponderant theme in his work ; it was openly affirmed with the work he presented at the Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987.

In 1988 the clothing with which he covered walls or the ground seem to be the key material which he progressively replaced the photographic portrait in his work : it was another anonymous and unique way to speak of the individual, using his clothing like a ghostly trace. The importance of counting and archiving, then the obsession with lists (ex : Liste des Suisses morts dans le Canton du Valais en 1991 ("List of Swiss Dead Valais Canton in 1991"), 1993) which his works in the 1990s bore witness to, were there to recall that in the masses, it is always the individual who counts. As in 1998, at his exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where he exhibited under the name "Menschlich" ("Human") a mural installation comprised of hundreds of anonymous photos of people "of whom we know nothing, each unique and without memory, without identity, irreplaceable and replaced".

The years 1990-2000 were marked also by a substantial investment in performance, which extends and enriches the visual art work. In this way he created, in collaboration with Jean Kalman and Frank Krawczyk, numerous performance works, temporary and animated installations which combined his usual vocabulary, the involvement of actors, sounds and light effects, all in often unexpected locations. Simultaneously with these performances, his exhibitions became more narrative and staged, in this way forming on overall work developed around a particular theme time, memory, the human being, death... His work therefore became universal through its detour through the specific and he even envisaged, for the year 2000, naming all the Earth's inhabitants ; it was a utopian project, which he had to abandon, although its spirit informed his subsequent work.

From that time he gave pride of place to fable-like projects with a humanist content, going so far as to create veritable legends. In this way he developed the project of creating a place where the entire world's heartbeats would be preserved. For this he collected millions of heartbeats, including his own, over time and through his exhibitions; these other heartbeats are from hundreds of individuals he recorded, heartbeats he labelled, archived and which from 2010 will form Les Archives du coeur, a permanent installation on Teshima Island in the Seto Sea, a Japanese inland sea. He set in permanent place an auditory clock in the crypt of Salzburg Cathedral. In the same spirit as his utopic "parable" works, Christian Boltanski "sold his life", in other words a continuous video recording of his actions and gestures in his studio, a lifetime annuity granted to a collector, to create another permanent installation, in Tasmania; it is what he calls "his deal with the devil".

(1) Entretien avec Elisabeth Lebovici, 2003