Museum of the Year nominee Jupiter Artland has recently opened its summer program, including a new permanent installation and two exhibits by France’s Christian Boltanski that will be on show until September 25.In the installation, which was unveiled on July 30 and is titled “Animitas,” Boltanski has placed hundreds of bells on long rods in the Edinburgh sculpture park’s duck pond. These have been arranged to replicate the position of the stars on the date of the artist’s birth, with each bell “chiming to the wind [to] let out the ‘music of the souls,’” according to the museum’s website.Alongside this permanent work — which joins sculptures by Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Cornelia Parker, and many others — are two new exhibition-cum-installations by Boltanski. The first is one of the artist’s “Theatre d’ombres (Theatre of Shadows)” works, which he has been producing since 1984. Using simple materials such as cutout shadow puppets and lights, Boltanski creates “a phantasmagoria.” Shadowy shapes of spectres and skulls fill the space, flickering and changing in size as the lights move, creating what one vendor of Boltanski’s work calls “a memento mori, reminding us of the transient nature of life and the inevitability of death.”If “Theatre d’ombres” is a work about death, then “Les Archives du Coeur (The Archives of the Heart)” is about life. The title refers to a real archive on an uninhabited Japanese island, where Boltanski holds a collection of recorded heartbeats. At Jupiter Artland, users are invited to add their heartbeat to this archive, helping to compile this extraordinarily emotive, humanist piece.“Theatre d’ombres” and “Les Archives du Coeur” can be seen at Jupiter Artland through September 25.
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