ART-PRESNTATION:Anri Sala-Answer Me
Anri Sala’s work explore the boundaries of history and geography, through the eyes of marginal characters who become accidental actors in collective dramas. Mingling personal stories with studies of society, as metaphors for global conflicts, Sala’s videos are like epiphanies and visions that reveal unexpected, overlooked fragments of reality. The Albanian artist uses various techniques and genres in his films, ranging from documentary to fiction, music videos to narrative sequences, to unveil reality while narrating little existential explorations.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive
Albanian artists are reflecting the tragedy of the present, while trying to escape from it, they are walking a tightrope stretched between brutality and comedy, between documentary and metaphors. Theirs is a struggle to articulate new forms and languages in order to come to terms with utopia. New Museum presents “Answer Me” an exhibition of the work of Anri Sala. Growing up in Albania, Anri Sala studied violin for seven years before abandoning music for the visual arts. Since graduating from the National Academy of Arts in Tirana and giving up painting for video, he has managed to unite his two interests, though. Music now plays a crucial role in his work, so does architecture, or rather, the interaction between sound and its environment. Highlighting Sala’s continuing interest in how sound and music can engage architecture and history, the exhibition features extensive multichannel audio and video installations that will unfold across the New Museum Galleries. In his early video works from the late ‘90s, Sala used documentary strategies to examine life after communism in his native Albania, observing the role of language and memory in narrating social and political histories. Since the early 2000s, his video works have probed the psychological effects of acoustic experiences, embracing both music and sound as languages capable of conjuring up images, rousing nostalgia, and communicating emotions. Since the mid-2000s, Sala’s works have featured musicians in both films and live performances: In films such as “Long Sorrow” and “Answer Me”, musicians intone requiems for the failed histories dormant in the architecture surrounding them. In “Le Clash” and “Tlatelolco Clash”, organ-grinders stroll deserted streets, amplifying a sense of alienation and uncertainty with their unexpected interpretations of a familiar song. The exhibition features a new spatialization of Sala’s “The Present Moment (in B-flat)” and “The Present Moment (in D)”, in which the artist rearranges Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht to create the sense that individual notes, abstracted from the composition, travel freely throughout the gallery before accumulating and playing in repetition as if trapped in a spatial impasse. The exhibition also includes the US premiere of “Ravel Ravel Unravel”, first exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale, where Sala represented France. Two interpretations of Maurice Ravel’s “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D-major” are projected simultaneously in a space designed to absorb sound. Sala recomposed the tempo of the concerto for each pianist so that the two performances progress in and out of sync to produce a paradoxical experience in a space in which actual echoes are impossible.
Info: Curator: Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Curator: Margot Norton, Assistant Curator: Natalie Bell, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 3/2-10/4/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
