Anri Sala
1974 (50 лет)
Intervista
Anri Sala
Intervista seeks to deal in microcosm with the issue of how Albanian communist-era elites have sought to justify their roles in the now-discredited regime that ruled the country for nearly half a century. This brief film offers some poignant vignettes of contemporary life in Albania... [and] also underscores the reluctance of Albania's former Communist elite to confront its past. Both the quality of its content and its length make Intervista a potentially valuable instructional resource
Interview
Déjeuner avec Marubi
Anri Sala
Anri Sala created the encounter between his Albanian heritage – a snapshot of the famous Studio Marubi, which had introduced photography into the Balkans as from end of the 19TH century – and a masterpiece of French art – Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édouard Manet – in an incongruous juxtaposition. We can see three women in traditional costume busying themselves around a sewing machine; the view is frontal, the pose frozen, a pure “Studio Marubi” snapshot. The insertion of a detail from Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe within this image looks like an “accidental encounter” introducing colours and nudity into a very classic photo. The characters in Déjeuner are gradually “swallowed up” by the sewing machine which soon will have finished weaving a traditional dress for the naked young woman painted by Manet, making her similar to the seamstresses. In less than a minute and in a manner apparently light even poetic, Anri Sala touches on the main themes so dear to this work.
Breakfast at Marubi
Answer Me
Anri Sala
Sala's most recent work, Answer Me, 2008 was filmed in a Buckminster Fuller-created geodesic dome in Berlin, a former NSA surveillance tower, which was constructed on the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), an artificial hill made of rubble from West Berlin under which a building by Albert Speer was buried. The interior of this abandoned dome is characterized by an extraordinarily long echo, which provoked Sala to stage a story there "whose drama would come under the influence of the building". The narrative is inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni, who wanted to shoot the silences in a couple's break-up. In Answer Me, the stillness becomes a loud stillness of silencing decibels: a woman tries to end a relationship, but her lover refuses to listen, playing fiercely on a drum set to silence her. Next to her, the drumsticks resting on a single drum play to the echo of his drumming.
Answer Me
Long Sorrow
Anri Sala
Long Sorrow (2005), filmed on a public housing estate in Berlin, is an enigmatic record of a performance orchestrated by the artist. Sala invited noted free jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc to perform while suspended outside the window of an empty apartment on the eighteenth floor. For the Serpentine, Sala staged the performance 3-2-1 (2011), in which saxophonists Andre Vida and Caroline Kraabel responded live to Long Sorrow in a series of daily performances. 3-2-1 begins with one of these saxophonists accompanying an audio recording of Moondoc’s improvisation with his own earlier performance on film, resulting in a ‘trio’: the film, the audio recording and the live performance. The saxophonist at the Serpentine then played live with Long Sorrow, a ‘duet’, before finally performing a solo after the film ended. 3-2-1 punctuated the fixed cycle of the show with an improvised element, integrating the strands of film and performance that run through Sala’s work.
Long Sorrow