Autel de Lycée Chases (Altar to the Chases High School)

Memory, mortality, and trauma, particularly as they pertain to the Holocaust, are central themes in Christian Boltanski’s work, as is the tension between appearance and disappearance, obfuscation and revelation. Over the course of his long career, Boltanski has worked in a variety of media, but he is best known for installations such as <em>Altar to the Chases High School</em>, in which lamps and rusty biscuit tins frame reproductions of class pictures taken in 1931 at a Jewish high school in Vienna. The design deliberately mimics that of a medieval altarpiece, with its candles, reliquaries, and painted portraits. Unlike a traditional memorial, however, the lamps that illuminate the pictures in <em>Altar to the Chases High School</em> also obscure them, effacing the individuals they represent. Deprived of both detail and context, moreover, these ghostly photographs betray little of their historical origins. In this way, the work conveys the universality of suffering as well as the insurmountable challenge of remembering — and representing — harrowing events.