Anri Sala

Anri Sala, AS YOU GO, 2019, 13-channel HD video and 22-channel discrete sound installation, color, 39:24 min. Exhibition view: Anri Sala, AS YOU GO, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2019. Photo © Antonio Maniscalco

From July 17 through October 10, Kunsthaus Bregenz dedicates a major solo exhibition to Anri Sala.

Musical phenomena play a major role in Sala’s work, his transformative, time-based works develop from a dense network of relations between sound, image, and architecture. A recurring medium in Sala's exhibition is film. In contrast to conventional cinema, Sala does not employ a strict narrative or even actors, it is rather musical pieces that become the real protagonists in the works. The cinematic results from the musical and not, as is customary, vice versa, enabling visitors to immerse themselves in a both visual and acoustic experience of the space.

Recent and entirely new works will be on view in the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz. A record player, floating freely in an abandoned space capsule, a subtle alternating between the architecture's contours being sharp or blurred, a garden snail slowly moving along a viola bow, a vintage wallpaper-printing roller whose metal pattern is translated into spectral sounds. All of these are elements and imagery that Anri Sala will be employing in engendering creative shifts and to probe existing interpretive relations.

Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

With Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal.

LUMA Arles, a 27-acre creative campus at the Parc des Ateliers in the city of Arles, opened to the public on June 26. Work by over 45 artists and designers is featured in the opening programme, with special new commissions for LUMA by major international artists.

At the heart of the site is Frank Gehry’s 15,000-square-metre tower, a twisting geometric structure finished with 11,000 stainless steel panels. The Tower houses exhibition galleries, project spaces and the LUMA’s research and archive facilities, alongside workshop and seminar rooms.

The Tower houses Philippe Parreno’s permanent commission Danny and Liam Gillick’s design for communal areas, entitled Laguna Gloria. In addition, on view in the Tower are a commissioned work by Tino Sehgal, This Element, and works from the collection, among them, Anri Sala’s 2018 film If and Only If, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Virtual Reality Environment, Endodrome, presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The Library is on Fire, a new commissioned work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Charles Arsène-Henry, will be inaugurated in September 2021. In the industrial Grande Halle in the Parc des Ateliers, Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition After UUmwelt will be on view through October 2021.

The campus is also home to seven former railway factories, four of which have been renovated by Selldorf Architects as exhibition and performance spaces. The surrounding gardens and public park are designed by landscape architect Bas Smets.

Roman Ondak, Perfect Society, 2018, exhibition view: Diversity United, Flughafen Tempelhof, Berlin, 2021. Photos: Silke Briel © Stiftung für Kunst and Kultur, Bonn⁠
⁠

Diversity United presents an artistic tour d'horizon of Europe currently. The trans-national exhibition shows paintings, sculptures, videos, new media, photographies, installations, drawings and object of art by about 90 artists from 34 countries, including Roman Ondak, Ugo Rondinone, and Anri Sala. They represent different generations, genders and regions and their work reflects the phenomenal diversity and vitality of Europe's contemporary art scene – from Portugal to Russia, from Norway to Turkey. 

The works on display shed light on themes such as freedom and democracy, migration and territory, political and personal identity, utopias and fears, which also revolve around the current pandemic. Diversity United reflects the complexity of the European idea and its social realities in a globalized world.
⁠

Photo © Lawrence Elisabeth⁠

Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston, presents a newly commissioned artwork for the by Anri Sala. This immersive new film and sound installation, titled Time No Longer, will occupy the Cistern for a period of nine months, transporting visitors into an other-worldly environment within this vast, subterranean reservoir.⁠⁠

Time No Longer will incorporate film projected onto a translucent, 22 by 150-foot (7 by 45-meter) screen with a soundtrack emanating throughout the space, its reverberations creating ripples on the surface of the water. Visitors will encounter the work in 360 degrees by making their way around the full perimeter of the 87,500-square-foot Cistern.⁠⁠

The film depicts a weathered turntable floating in a space station. It is tethered only by its electric cord, which allows it to keep playing a vinyl record. There appears to be no human presence to listen to it, and an uneasy quiescence around it suggests it may be spinning in the aftermath of a catastrophe – a custodian of that absent humanity.⁠

Read more

Anri Sala, Take Over, 2017, back-to-back HD video projections, colour, 8-channel sound, glass elements, duration 7:56 min, 258 x 873 x 873 cm.
Exhibition view: Anri Sala, Take Over, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2017
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2019
Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Opening on December 14, Centro Botín in Santander presents AS YOU GO (Châteaux en Espagne), by Anri Sala.

The title of the exhibition, AS YOU GO, implies the idea of movement: that of a time-based work, informed by music and moving images; and that of the visitors, who Sala implicitly encourages to keep moving and hence partake in the making of their own individual experience of an exhibition that bears a certain resemblance to a performative stage.

More information HERE.

Photo © Jutta Benzenberg⁠

On the occasion of his exhibition Le Temps coudé, and the launch of the catalogue Coudées : Quatre variations sur Anri Sala, Anri Sala will be discussing his work with Suzanne Cotter, director of Mudam⁠ and curator of the exhibition. The talk will be held in French.⁠

To book tickets for the talk please click HERE.

Anri Sala, Dammi i Colori, 2003, single-channel video and stereo sound, duration: 15 min 25 sec
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2019
Film still © Anri Sala

Bar Laika presents: one year old and a screening of Anri Sala, Dammi i Colori

Anri Sala, Dammi I Colori, 2003, chronicles the work of Sala’s friend and former artist Edi Rama as Mayor of Tirana, Albania. Dammi i Colori evokes the city as canvas and champions art as a means for social transformation. Edi Rama became mayor of Tirana in 2000, and quickly went about re-painting the capital’s decaying buildings in brilliant, provocative colors and patterns. His aesthetic and political act was a powerful visualization of change—a source of both public debate and renewed civic pride.  

Anri Sala, The Last Resort, 2017, 42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers, duration 58:28 min., looped, ø 850 cm. Exhibition view: The Last Resort, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2018. The Last Resort originally premiered at Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2019. Photo © Ivan Erofeev

Over the past two decades Anri Sala has created an exceptional body of films and installations in which sound, music and the projected image come together to express themes of lived and historic time. This exhibition presents major installations, film works and drawings by Sala from the past five years. The title Le Temps coudé, borrows from the French phrase ‘faire un coude’ and refers to warps or bends in our experience of what we see, hear and know.

More information HERE

Pierre Huyghe, Zoodrum 4, 2011, live marine ecosystem, resin shell after Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910) Ishikawa Foundation, Okayama, Japan. © Pierre Huyghe
Photo © Guillaume Ziccarelli

Coinciding with the inauguration of the Hôtel des Collections on June 29, the MO.CO. unveils the first public presentation of masterpieces from the Ishikawa Collection. This outstanding and relatively recent private collection begun in 2011 by Yasuharu Ishikawa, a Japanese entrepreneur born in 1970 at Okayama, is characterized by exceptional coherence and a Japanese feel that derives primarily from its emphasis on minimal, understated, subtle forms.

The exhibition Intimate Distance, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT) features nearly 30 works by artists such as Simon Fujiwara, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, and Anri Sala.

Read more

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Helen & Gordon, Safety Curtain, Vienna State Opera, 2015/2016
© museum in progress (www.mip.at) © Adagp, Paris 2019
Photo © Andreas Scheiblecker

Opera as the World is a journey through the history of opera in the 20th and 21st centuries, and specifically its relations with the visual arts. Anything but a conventional reading of its subject and much more than a presentation of set designs by artists, it seeks to relate – either echoing or in opposition to the legacy of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk – how the visual arts and opera have nurtured and, on occasion, radically influenced each other. From the experimental staging of the first avant-garde production to the works of contemporary artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Anri Sala, the exhibition maps interdisciplinarity from a different perspective.

Photo © Jutta Benzenberg

A public talk with Anri Sala about the exhibition AS YOU GO, which was specifically designed for the spaces on the third floor of the Castello di Rivoli, will be the starting point for the conversation.⠀

Read More

Anri Sala, Take Over (Marseillaise), 2017, HD video projection, color, stereo sound, duration 7:56 min
Film still © Anri Sala

Skanderbeg Square, Tirana

Photo © Filip Dujardin

Esther Schipper congratulates Anri Sala and the architecture firm 51N4E, who have won the European Prize for Urban Public Space for their renovation of Skanderbeg Square in Sala's native Tirana, Albania. 

Like no other public space, Skanderbeg Square, Tirana’s nerve centre and symbolic site for the whole country, reflects Albania’s complex, convulsive history. Finalised in 2017, the rennovation has turned Skanderbeg Square into a public space of more than ten hectares exclusively for the pedestrian use. In the centre of the square there is a clear esplanade of almost 40,000 square metres. Rather than being flat, the esplanade is shaped like a four-sided Roman pyramid with a slope of 2.5% and a height of two metres at its tip. A fountain at the top lets water trickle down the sides, thus bringing out the colours of the mosaic paving which is made from stones from all over Albania.

Kunsthalle for Music at Witte de With in Rotterdam was the subject of a recent feature by Nina Siegal in the New York Times. Led by Artistic Director Ari Benjamin Meyers, this exhibition includes a newly commissioned work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, as well as a repetoire of existing pieces collected from Anri Sala and Tino Sehgal, among other artists and composers. The exhibition also includes three of Meyers’ works: Serious Immobilities, Duet, and Anthem.

Read more

Find more about the exhibition here: www.kunsthalleformusic.org

Anri Sala, The Last Resort, 2017

42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers

Duration 58:28 min, dimensions ø 850 cm

Photo © Peter Greig

On October 14, Anri Sala will share his insights into the conceptual and creative development of The Last Resort in a conversation with Maud Page, Deputy Director and Director of Collections, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Read more about the event here

The 57th International Art Exhibition, VIVA ARTE VIVA, will take place at the Giardini and the Arsenale in Venice, from May 13 to November 26, 2017. Curated by Christine Macel, it will feature 120 artists from 51 countries, including Liu Ye, Philippe Parreno, and Anri Sala.

The exhibition will offer a route that unfolds over the course of nine chapters or families of artists, beginning with two introductory realms in the Central Pavilion, followed by another seven across the Arsenale through the Giardino delle Vergini. Each of the nine chapters or families of artists of the Exhibition will represent a Pavilion in itself, or rather a Trans-Pavilion as it is trans-national by nature but echoes the Biennale's historical organization into pavilions, the number of which has never ceased to grow since the end of the 1990s. From the "Pavilion of Artists and Books" to the "Pavilion of Time and Infinity", these nine episodes will tell a story that is often discursive and at times paradoxical, with detours that mirror the world's complexities, a multiplicity of approaches and a wide variety of practices.