Christian Boltanski: Chance

Overview

The 2014 Sydney Festival is almost upon us and Carriageworks' offering is shaping up to be one of the highlights. Sydney's cultural stalwart will present Chance, a large-scale installation by French superstar artist Christian Boltanski.

The industrial-looking work is made up of scaffolding throughout which images of newborn babies will be woven. Visitors will be able to move throughout the enormous structure — it will be over 50 metres long and 8 metres tall — as the images slide through the scaffolding like a giant newspaper press. Two large clocks will be placed within the installation, charting births and deaths as they happen in real-time. At midnight, the clocks will summarise the final count of births and deaths for that day.

Chance eloquently examines memory, loss and the fragile human condition. The work centres around the idea that, from conception to expiration, chance plays a defining roll in how our lives play out.

The site-specific work will be accompanied by a game. Casino slot-machine type devices will be presented in a few places around Carriageworks. When you press a button, the machine will present spliced images of various faces. On occasions where the various images match up, the lucky visitor will receive a prize.

This mega installation will be the first major work the artist has ever presented in Australia and will respond to the architecture and massive open spaces of the Carriageworks building. The "poet advocate for the dispossessed" is one of the major players in the international art scene and his works reside in many of the world's best collections of Contemporary art.

The installation will also be accompanied by a talk on Thursday, January 9, 6pm, between Boltanski and uber art critic Dr Andrew Frost. The talk is free, but bookings are essential. See the Carriageworks website for details.

Image: Christian Boltanski, Chance. Image courtesy of Carriageworks.