Art Encounters 2017 Exhibitions:
Whoʼs afraid of politics?

Anri Sala’s early videos and films mined his personal experience to reflect on the social and political change taking place in his native Albania. Anri Sala (b. 1974) has attached a growing importance to sound, creating remarkable works in which he recasts sound’s relationship to the image. Linked to this development is Sala’s long-standing interest in performance, and particularly musical performance.

Selected solo exhibitions: Answer me, New Museum, New York (2016); The Present Moment (in D), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Black Box: Anri Sala, Baltimore Museum of Art (2014); No Names No Title, The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2014); 1395 Days Without Red, Palazzo Grassi Teatrino, Venice (2013); Air Cushioned Ride, CAC Malaga, Malaga (2013); Anri Sala, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (2012); Anri Sala, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2011); Anri Sala: Purchase Not By Moonlight, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2008); Long Sorrow, De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg (2008).

He also held exhibitions at the 55th and the 57th edition of the International Venice Biennale (2013 and 2017, respectively).

In the 1990’s, Anri Sala used documentary strategies in his early video works to examine life after communism in Albania by exploring the role of language and memory in social and political histories. His video works after the 2000’s examine the psychological effects of acoustic experiences by considering music and sound as languages in themselves.

Anri Sala’s 1395 Days Without Red, 2011, is a collaborative film-project between Sala and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers. From 1992 to 1996, during the siege of Sarajevo, thousands of citizens had to cross streets threatened by snipers. The citizens wore dark colors for fear of otherwise alerting snipers who stood guard from the hillside. In Sala’s film, a young woman relives the experience of the trauma of the siege while making her way through an empty city. The film is a metaphor for an individual journey through the collective memory of the city.

Images:

1. Anri Sala, Portrait, photo credits: Anri Sala

2. Anri Sala, 1395 Days without Red (2011), in collaboration with Liria Begeja, from a project by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers, video still, HD video projection, colour, sound: discrete 5.1, on loop, 43’46’’, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Marian Goodman and Hauser & Wirth, photo credits: Anri Sala / ADAGP, Paris