Boltanski's Shadows: Plato's Cave and the Dance of Death

A reprint of Didier Semin's 1988 essay on Christian Boltanski's 'Ombres' (Shadows) series, published in artpress issue 472 to coincide with Boltanski's retrospective 'Faire son temps' at Centre Pompidou, Paris (November 13, 2019 – March 16, 2020). Semin explores Boltanski's use of shadows as a metaphor for memory, fiction, and mortality, linking the works to Plato's cave allegory, Freudian screen memories, and the artist's own fabricated biography. The essay argues that Boltanski's shadows reveal the mechanisms of representation—unlike Indonesian shadow puppets, they expose their own fragile apparatus. Semin connects the series to earlier works like 'Inventaires' and 'Compositions' (1980–83), and to broader traditions of memento mori, including Poussin's 'Et in Arcadia Ego' and Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skulls. The text also references Sarah Kofman's 'Camera obscura' and Eisenstein's 'Que viva Mexico'. The cover image is Boltanski's 'Théâtre d'ombres' (1984).