Image: Christian Boltanski, Chance, Pavillon français, Biennale de Venise, 2011 © Photo:Didier Plowy Coproduction Institut français/Centre national des arts plastiques
A large-scale immersive installation, CHANCE, will be installed in the Carriageworks public space from 10 January to 23 March 2014. Life, the universe and everything will be examined from the perspective of randomness, where events of birth and death come down to luck of the draw.
This is the first time a major work from Boltanski has been exhibited in Australia.
Despite being previously exhibited in the Venice Biennale French Pavilion (2011), The Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (2012), and at the Casa Franca Brasil in Rio de Jeneiro (2012), the Carriageworks incantation of CHANCE will be site-specific, with the artist flying in to reconfigure the structure. This is to take full advantage of the particular shape and size of the Carriageworks’ exhibition area.
Working in such an unusual place is nothing new for Boltanski. ‘Boltanski has been working and exhibiting in non-traditional museum spaces since the 1990s and this installation at Carriageworks offers the artist the opportunity to further explore his interests in this area,’ said Carriageworks Director Lisa Havilah. ‘It will really respond to the industrial architecture of Carriageworks.’
Boltanski will use piping, scaffolding and digital screens to construct a complex installation with mixed media elements. Visitors will be able to move underneath and through the structure as a large filmstrip with images of newborn babies sourced from Polish press rapidly passes around them in the interior.
Two ticking clocks embedded in the work will count real-time births and deaths across the globe, with a total count of gains and losses tallied each midnight. This will prompt visitors to consider mortality and the fragility of existence.
A further aspect to the construction is CHANCE: the game, which will be set up in in various locations around the venue. These reimagined ‘pokies’ machines will allow visitors to mix and match components of digitally projected human faces at the touch of a button.
According to Boltanski, ‘CHANCE is about hazard … I mixed together portraits of Polish newborns and deceased elderly Swiss people. I cut each face into three parts: forehead, eyes and mouth. As in a slot machine, you push the button and have a randomly assembled face.’
A mash up of bizarre combinations can be expected as users try their luck for a total match that will win them a prize.
‘The basic idea is that we are linked to chance from the moment our parents made love. If they had made love a few seconds before or after, we would have been different. It is a mere technical and temporal matter: we are just the result of chance. There is nothing mystical about our existence,’ said Boltanski.
The Paris-born-and-based artist first gained recognition in the late 1960s for short avant-garde films and the publication of various notebooks. These dealt with childhood, and themes relating to his and other’s existence. Boltanski moved on to photography and sculptural experimentalism with clay and other materials in the 1970s before integrating media and light into his work in the mid 1980s.
As his works expanded in scale, Boltanski looked for alternative spaces to stage his creations. Unusual sites become ground zero for works exploring human displacement.
Memory and existence are repeated themes within his art, and these ideas and more will be discussed at a live talk between Boltanski and art critic, writer, curator and broadcaster Andrew Frost. The discussion will take place at Carriageworks on 9 January, 2014.
With more than twenty years writing about art, film and music for various magazines, as well as being art critic for The Guardian, and writer and presenter for three-part series The Art Life on ABC1, Frost will no doubt prompt an animated and insightful discussion with Boltanski.
Although the event at Carriageworks will be free, it requires booking due to limited audience capacity.
According to Carriageworks Director Lisa Havilah, Carriageworks is delighted to present the exhibition CHANCE in Sydney and believes the work’s occupation of one of Carriageworks largest areas will prove popular. ‘Audiences have really responded to the large scale works that we’re commissioning for those spaces,’ said Havilah.
2014 is set to be a big year for Carriageworks. ‘One of the key things about the artistic program for 2014 is the level of increase in scale. We’ve got double the amount of projects than we did last year, because we had significant physical growth,’ said Havilah. This has seen audiences double in size and has led to the commission of new works, and a much larger artistic program.
‘One of the real growth areas of our program is the increase in scale of our visual arts program … We also incorporate a whole range of large scale events that present contemporary fashion and food and a whole range of different cultural elements of contemporary life.’
While CHANCE, by Christian Boltanski, highlights questions of mortality and meaning that are sure to resonate with those who visit, it is but one of many innovative and diverse cultural experiences on offer at Carriageworks in 2014. Artgoers should prepare themselves for a year of artistic overload.
CHANCE, by Christian Boltanski, will be installed at Carriageworks public space from 10 January – 23 March 2014. The exhibition is free and will run from 10am to 6pm every day. Visit the Carriageworks site for more information.
CHANCE will be presented in association with Sydney Festival, which runs from 9 January to 26 January. A full event listing for the Sydney Festival can be found on its website.
