Anri Sala is not easily swayed. ‘There’s something from my past that’s given me immunity to the demands of the artworld,’ he says, speaking in measured sentences in his Berlin studio. ‘I tend to not want to feed the zeitgeist.’
As we discuss art’s current trends – which so often call for direct political messages – the timelessness of Sala’s work becomes increasingly striking. So does the artist’s subtle resolve, shaped by his youth in Communist Albania, which until 1990 was bound by strict ideologies and isolation. Sala’s art is almost always political, but rarely overtly so. Woven through the works are also arcane historical factoids, language, and more abstract conditions like loneliness, or left-handedness. ‘It’s important to take care of the ambiguity of things, which is being increasingly killed,’ he explains. ‘The ambiguity, the interval, the thing in between, the shades, the nuance. The inframince, as Duchamp called it.’
Sala is welcoming and warm but almost disarmingly forthright; he is also phenomenally cerebral and articulate. Yet in the monumental video installations he’s best known for, he uses music, not words, as a point of departure and a scripting tool for multilayered narratives which remix time and space. Classical pieces with loaded histories underpin artworks in which silences and pauses are as powerful as sounds or visuals. The installations are often majestic, with projection screens claiming broad swathes of space in otherwise empty, darkened rooms. In the 13-minute Time No Longer (2021), for example – Sala’s first work produced entirely in CGI – we see in close-up a stylus hovering and swinging as it hesitates to settle its needle into a groove on a vinyl record. The turntable it is attached to floats and spins in zero gravity within the International Space Station.
Time No Longer is the centerpiece of an upcoming solo exhibition at Paris’s Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, where it will be installed on a 24-meter curved LED screen in the building’s skylit rotunda. Its soundtrack is an arrangement of Messiaen’s ‘The Abyss of the Birds’ movement from his Quartet for the End of Time (1941), pared to a dissonant duet between clarinet and saxophone. Coupled with the rendering of the rotating turntable, the effect is eerie. The work was inspired by Ronald McNair, a saxophone-playing African-American astronaut who intended to make the first musical recording in space on the US Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. But this of course never happened; Challenger broke apart in the sky only 73 seconds after it launched. Everyone onboard perished.
‘It’s about the story of McNair, but also the story of the Quartet – the best-known Western piece of music written in captivity,’ explains Sala. Messiaen composed it not for professional musicians, but rather for an ensemble of fellow inmates who happened to be musicians, while he was held in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Sala rearranged it, with longtime collaborators Olivier Goinard and André Vida, to evoke the loneliness or even calm of captivity, whether in a prison or a spaceship. (McNair, incidentally, had intended to perform a different piece – the narrative pairing is Sala’s). ‘There’s an interval between these two stories; there’s an interval between the clarinet and the saxophone, and this absent humanity in the film. It looks like the turntable is floating forever in space,’ says Sala.
This and other works are dense with such substories. But viewers need not understand or even be aware of their multiple references as they take in the sensory information, which can be so evocative that some are moved to tears. ‘By no means do I expect or believe that the backgrounds come across in the work,’ says Sala. ‘I leave my research backstage.’
Other time-based works on view include 1395 Days Without Red (2011), which follows a woman – an actress portraying a member of the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, which continued to rehearse and perform during the Balkan wars in the 1990s – as she crosses the infamous Sniper Alley during the 1,395-day siege of Sarajevo. As she runs, she hums her part from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, her ragged breathing reflecting both the horrors around her and music’s transformative power. There’s also Take Over (2017), a two-channel video in which the left-wing anthem The Internationale and the French national anthem La Marseillaise are simultaneously performed by a player piano and a pianist (in each channel, they switch parts). The songs are in fact historically intertwined: because there was no money to pay a composer early on, The Internationale was sung to the tune of La Marseillaise for 17 years. But even without this information, thelow-lit close-ups and mashed-up melodies are utterly hypnotic.
We sit in Sala’s studio in a converted industrial complex a few blocks from Berlin’s main train station. For the past year it’s been the artist’s primary workspace, although he is often in Paris, where he continued his studies after finishing art school in Tirana and where he keeps a pied-à-terre. Behind floor-to-ceiling curtains sits a work station and an upright piano (it’s all vaguely reminiscent of the setups in his installations and Sala jokes that his home looks like this, too). A snare drum – a leitmotif from previous works – hangs upside-down from the ceiling. Sala played violin from the age of four to eleven. ‘I convinced my parents to let me play,’ he explains, and it is an experience that he says still informs how he deals with music. Goinard, a sound engineer, works diligently at a computer. Covering one wall is a meticulously organized bookshelf, packed with scholarly reading material. No wonder: Sala’s mother was the director of the National Library in Albania, where he had access to forbidden art books.
Also on the walls are multicolored works on paper, which turn out to be manipulated maps – Norway, Cuba, Lebanon, Somalia, and other countries twisted into abstractions. They’re set against found, hand-colored etchings of animals from the 17th and 18th centuries. The pairings will appear as diptychs in 25 vitrines in the corridor of the Bourse: an exhibition within an exhibition. Many of the original etchings bent the bodies of newly ‘discovered’ species to fit the page or frame, but in anatomically impossible ways. Sala stuffs the borders of nation-states, rendered as shapes in layers and gradients of ink and pastel colors, into similarly limited spaces, with, say, Baja California bent to unite America in the north and Mexico in the south. ‘What does this mean, in our imagination, for the politics of those countries?’ asks Sala. This untitled body of work has evolved for years alongside Sala’s video practice, a vestige, perhaps, of the artist’s early art education in fresco painting.
The Bourse exhibition – a part of the Pinault Collection’s ‘Une seconde d’éternité’ group show – feels like a mini-retrospective showing Sala’s artistic range, depth, and evolution. How does he see his work, and himself, as he looks back? ‘It’s sometimes a matter of epiphanies,’ he says. ‘I’ve realized that all these works are about pairs, and the tensions between them,’ he says. Time’s passage, as well as its malleability, also permeates his oeuvre. It’s as if Sala liberates his material, but also his viewers, from linear time’s restrictions (even if he wears an analog wristwatch, a rarity in these digital times). ‘I like to use a piece of music as a fossil, which is a trace of its own past context, but also bring it toward its own future, which is our present,’ he says, explaining how recasting classical works might result in jazzy riffs, even if the jazz genre didn’t exist when they were composed. Considering these temporal sleights of hand, time really is no longer, and even a second of eternity trumps a fleeting, fickle zeitgeist.
Kimberly Bradley is a writer, editor, and educator based in Berlin.
Anri Sala is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, London, Paris), kurimanzutto (Mexico D.F., New York), and Hauser & Wirth (Zürich, New York, Gstaad, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Menorca, Monaco, Somerset, Southampton, St. Moritz). Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth will participate in the Galeries sector of Paris+ par Art Basel, from Thursday, October 20 to Sunday, October 23, 2022.
October 14, 2022 to January, 3 2023
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Paris
All photos and videos: Ériver Hijano for Paris+ par Art Basel.