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Memory is perhaps one of the most fragile components of the human psyche, and is easily manipulated under the strains of personal experiences and traumas. They say that no two people in the world will recall the same incident in the same way and that we have subconscious control over what we choose to store in our memory banks. Our past, and the way in which we choose to remember it, defines us as a person. Societies and cultures also remember historical events so that they are commemorated with a specific bias. Two artists who have approached this concept through their work are Christian Boltanski with No Man’s Land (2010), a recent installation at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, New York, as part of the Park Avenue Armory exhibition (2010), and Jitish Kallat with Public Notice 1 (2003), included in the 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in 2007. Both artworks share a common theme of memorialisation, however challenge their viewers slightly differently. Boltanski raises the question of the rationalisation of one human’s inhumanity to another and the moral disregard of the Nazi reign, while Kallat looks at independence, asking the viewer to personally reflect on the ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech made by India’s first Prime Minister.
French artist Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land memorialised the ordinary people lost in the Jewish genocide. Born of a Jewish father during the Nazi occupation in Paris, Boltanski experienced first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust and the manifestation of his personal memories are a major theme in No Man’s Land. Upon walking into the installation inside the fifty-five thousand square foot, cold and barren Wade Thompson Drill Hall... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline