TASMANIA COMES TO PARIS - or rather HOBART DOES
This had been on my agenda for some time and I was looking forward to the exhibition immensely. I haven’t been back to Tasmania for nearly 40 years. Tasmania was coming to Paris. Or rather the exhibition, « Theatre of Memory » adapted for La Maison Rouge following the Hobart exhibition in 2012. David Walsh is an entrepreneur, a maker and a creator. I gather the venue he has built in Hobart includes space for concerts as well as a hotel and restaurants. Hardly a conventional museum. But the man is anything but conventional. The first time that I had come in contact with Walsh was during the Boltanski Monument in Paris in 2010. The lecturer asked me if I had heard of David Walsh and the bet he had made, a rather black bet with Boltanski……I had not. David Walsh first made global headlines in 2009, when he gambled on the life of Christian Boltanski, a French artist whose installations focus on death. Walsh was a mysterious figure even in his home, Tasmania, where,...