Christian Boltanski is fascinated by personal histories. “What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly,” he told Tate magazine in 2002. “We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them.” And so he retraces the stories of forgotten souls, repurposing found objects and photographs into thought-provoking installations. “Emotion comes from time,” says Botanski. —E.C.