CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI

Son of a Cristian mother and Jewish father, Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944) has focused much of his work in those items which are inseparable from his origins. The Holocaust, memory and death are some of his work's issues, featuring photography, sculpture, film and installations.   

Es Baluard  presents from July 1 to September 25, 2011  the  work Signatures which Christian  Boltanski has  conceived specifically to be placed in the Es Baluard’s Aljub, the old subterranean watertank built in the 17th Century which was turned into one of the museum's exhibition halls. Signatures, the first solo exhibition of Christian  Boltanski in Es Baluard and the one that takes place while the artist represents France in the Venice Biennale 2011, is focused on the memory of the people who built the Aljub and the bastion of Sant Peter, which lend the space to museum Es Baluard (the word baluard in Catalan means bastion).  

The  installation Signatures is connected to the lapidary symbols that appear on the  stones in the walls in the Aljub and the bastion. “These symbols correspond to the kind of marks used by stonemasons to indetify the work each of them had completed and thus determine the wage that corresponded to them. For his installation the French artist has taken around twenty of these linear marks, which he has reproduced in neon and which, having placed each of them on a support to keep it up, emerge like light signals, shattering the darkness, from the general half-light of the aljub hall”. (Fernando Huici, text from the exhibition’s catalogue).

Location-Hall: Aljub.

Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma.