Εyes

Throughout his artistic career, Christian Boltanski has defended the right to freedom for every human being, irrespective of their nationality, their religion or the social class to which they belong. This is the freedom he demands for all the anonymous victims of the concentration camps, for all the anonymous citizens in all the countries of the world who are subject to every kind of repression.

Armed with the black and white photographs he collects as relics of people he never knew, with the weak yellowish light of old-fashioned light bulbs and digital chronometers that measure out human existence second by second, he becomes the ultimate anthropocentric artist, an archivist and chronicler of human traces.

In his emotionally-charged installation, “Eyes”, Boltanski can hardly wait to magnify Athenian eyes draws from actual ID photographs and to invite visitors to actively participate by recording their heartbeat in real time in an effort to keep their biological and mental imprint alive into perpetuity. By putting an individual face to anonymity, he starts a dialogue between the personal and impersonal and leads us up a stage from ‘looking’ to ‘seeing’ by helping us acquire the awareness and self-awareness the latter demands.