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26/3/2002

Christian Boltanski

South London Gallery SLG, London

Les Abonnés du Téléphone

For his forthcoming solo show at the SLG, the internationally renowned French artist, Christian Boltanski is set to transform the space into an extaordinary library of some 3,000 telephone directories from all over the world.
Visitors can browse through the directories, homing in on the familiar - perhaps a friend living in another country - or being drawn to the exotic, to countries they barely knew existed. Whichever course they choose, it will inevitably be a personal one and this oscillation between the global and the individual, the international and the local is central to the work. These relationships are further developed in a specially commissioned sound piece in which the names of the 12,000 registered voters living within ten minutes' walk of the Gallery are read out from different points around the space.

Christian Boltanski's work over the past four decades has focused in different ways on the notion of individual identity, on the ways in which we strive to create and maintain it, and the degree to which it is lost in the midst of collective experience. Archiving, and our obsession with recording and classifying our own lives and those of others, is another recurrent theme.
Boltanksi's installation works have involved the archiving of thousands of photographs, room-fulls of clothes and tons of lost property. 'Les Abonnés du Téléphone' is an archive of the whole world, in one gallery space. Like every other archive it is both incomplete and fundamentally flawed, in this case by the absence of telephone networks in some countries, of telephone directories in others, and by individual's exclusion, be it voluntary or economic, from directory listings.

Christian Boltanski was born in France in 1944, and has exhibited extensively internationally. This is his first solo show in a public space in London in over 10 years. The artist will produce a special pull-out section for the second issue of the SLG newspaper. Les Abonnés du Téléphone is on loan from the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

TALKS AT SLG
Thursday 11 April, 7.30pm Sue Hubbard, award-winning poet, novelist and critic, will give a talk about Christian Boltanksi's work.

Admission free

Thursday 25 April, 7.30pm
Christian Boltanski will return to the SLG to give a talk about his work.

Tickets £5.00/£2.50 concessions. No advance booking

Image: Christian Boltanski, Reflexion (detail) 2000 Installation at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Opening times : Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday Ilam to 6pm. Thursday Ilam to 7pm. Saturday and Sunday 2pm to 6pm. Closed Monday.

South London Gallery
65 Peckham Road - London SE5 8UH
tel +44 020 77036120
fax +44 020 725247

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