Personnes, Paris

There is something very powerful about walking into huge industrial cathedrals of a bygone era – such as abandoned steelworks, or the vast voids of Battersea Power Station on London’s Southbank, or Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Grand Palais in Paris, which I visited for the first time the last weekend, is one such space, devoted to contemporary art.

It houses Christian Boltanski’s latest installation for Monumenta 2010 – an annual review of art. Personnes can only be described as a reflection on death. As a visitor, you go through a cursory security check, then walk into a rusting wall of numbered boxes set as a barrier in front of your path – you are obliged to walk around it, under its haunting light bulbs. The bulbs, peculiarly reminiscent of those hanging around the fences of concentration camps, were the first indicators, to me, that I was stepping into an installation about death.

With a post modern sense of shock, I became aware of being – not feeling, but being – incredibly lonely in this too-large-to-be-crowded space. Watching people take pictures of each other in front of the huge mound of worn clothes was eery. On the other hand, I felt a sudden warm and irresistible connection to the little kid who picked up her younger toddler brother and pretended to throw him onto the pile – to his immense delight.

The framed quandrangle spaces are much more individual – fewer people walk there, they walk alone, and they walk in silence, as if among gravestones. Those empty clothes, laid out on their front, all pointing forwards, toward the huge mound, don’t resemble corpses at all – but seem to touch a deep fear inside us, of anonymity, genocide, impersonal death by number.

The huge industrial crane that supposedly picks up the clothes from the mound and drops them haphazardly, indicating the randomness of death, was not working when we visited. But the experience was intense, desolate, and I rather imagined its terrifying robotic movement like the breathing of this installation – more terrible than if it had been working.

We walked out very quietly, moved and troubled.