Known for his installations that confront death, mortality, memory and loss, ‘CHANCE’ by French artist Christian Boltanski at Sydney’s Carriageworks is a playfully dark industrial yet delicate presentation of life and death. Boltanski’s often confronting work uses archival portraits of people from generations past installed with eerie lighting in darkened spaces. This installation however, he sees as a more optimistic interpretation of such themes.
Installed in the warehouses of Carriageworks, which lend themselves perfectly to Boltanski’s style, ‘CHANCE’ is a mechanical, factory-like construction framed within a large scaffolding structure. The central part of the work consists of scrolling paper, similar to a filmstrip, and printed with photographs of newborn babies that Boltanski collected from Polish newspapers. Driven by motors, the strip of babies’ faces move through the scaffolding in a mechanical fashion that evokes ideas of assembly lines and machinery: impersonal, automatic, and cold. Every so often, the scrolling stops, highlighting one of the babies’ faces from the rest with a sound effect like that of a winning contestant on a game show, and the portrait is highlighted and displayed on an illuminated screen. Boltanski draws on ideas of random selection, choosing the lucky one from a mass of population, who at birth, are all the same.
Alongside the scaffolding sit two large digital counters, titled Last News From Humans. Throughout each day, one counter continuously accumulates the number of births in the world, which appears in green, and the other, the number of deaths, which are counted in red. The statistics are tallied up at midnight each night, before re-setting for the next day. The births are consistently higher than the deaths, a signifier of the world’s growing population. Another component of the work is an interactive game called Be New that can be accessed from a screen in the gallery, or from offsite. Activated like a poker machine, participants are faced with a portrait cut into three horizontal sections, each section flicking through a series of faces, this time newborns as well as deceased elderly people. In this work, viewers take on control of the selection of constructing the identity of the portrait on the screen. The aim of the game is to match up the three sections into one face, with the odds of winning 1 in 40,000.
The four components of ‘CHANCE’ together create a collection of material that reduces the concept of life and death down to ticking numbers, monotone machinery, and combinatory sequences in a world directed by chance. Using technology ranging from the analogue basis of film and a structure that resembles a factory style printing press creates a materiality indicative of impersonal, inorganic, mass production. Also engaging with digital technology and networked statistics, the work links archival material to real time interaction, to remind us of our part in a greater sequential system of life and death. Boltanski engages us as viewers, participants, and subjects all at the same time. In doing so, he brings us into awareness of what we are apart of as a global population, but that ultimately, we are only one person in millions, whose existence and identity is nothing but chance.
The experience of ‘CHANCE’ is conflicting and perplexing, as it explores what many people find confronting, negative and grim. However Boltanski sees this as one of his more optimistic works, and that it is about destiny and love rather than sadness. Woven through the four components of ‘CHANCE’, Boltanski presents life and death as a game and a lottery beyond our control, but perhaps just being alive, we have won.
Carriageworks
Until 23 March, 2014
Sydney
Chance (detail), 2014, installation view at Carriageworks, Sydney
Be New, 2014, installation view at Carriageworks, Sydney
Photography by Zan Wimberley
Courtesy the artist and Carriageworks
