Christian Boltanski

The faint light of low-voltage bulbs envelops the gallery space, casting a dim glow on tall bookshelves and a row of tables with benches for reading. This is the atmosphere that greets visitors to Christian Boltanski’s solo exhibition, which transforms the PAC into a library of souls, a sort of archive of everyone on earth. The huge bookshelf holds editions of most of the world’s phone books—a collection the artist has been building up for years. Visitors can climb a ladder to reach the phonebooks, looking up names, telephone numbers, and addresses for a good portion of the world’s inhabitants. Boltanski starts from the supposition that everyone begins to exist the moment he or she becomes associated with a name. And so the identity of each of us, our terrestrial presences, and our place in posterity are guaranteed by the words printed in the phone books. Other works in this decades-spanning show—such as an archive of photographs of people who have died, and 6 septembres, 2005, a video that presents events that took place on the titular date (the artist’s birthday) in various years—similarly encourage meditations on life, death, and the implacable passage of time.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.