CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER AND MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART NORTH MIAMI JOINTLY ANNOUNCE THE FIRST MAJOR MUSEUM EXHIBITION OF ALBANIAN ARTIST ANRI SALA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FIRST MAJOR MUSEUM EXHIBITION OF ANRI SALA TO BE PRESENTED AT MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NORTH MIAMI DECEMBER 3 – MARCH 1 AND CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, CINCINNATI MAY 30

An intriguing exhibition unfolds in two volumes of carefully choreographed dialogue using music, video, space and time to detail the artist’s unique aesthetics.

The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami jointly announce a solo exhibition by Albanian artist Anri Sala. The exhibition Anri Sala: Purchase Not By Moonlight premieres at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach from December 3, 2008 – March 1, 2009 and at the CAC in the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art May 30, 2009 – September 6, 2009. The exhibition features seven films from the late1990s to the present including a new film, Answer Me, as well as photographs and sculptures that explore a dialogue about the interplay of the works with space and time.

The exhibition is co-organized by the two institutions and curated by Raphaela Platow, CAC’s Alice & Harris Weston Director and Chief Curator. “Anri Sala is an artist who intrigues with his particular kind of storytelling and focus on simple phenomena,” says Platow. “He deals with themes of music, language and time passing from a unique, sensitive perspective that is both political and emotional.”

This first major U.S. museum show of Sala’s work is presented as one exhibition with two volumes, both carefully designed to resonate with each respective space. Sala’s work engages and responds to each museum’s respective space, expanding over time as the space and the film impact how a visitor approaches each.

“The installation at MOCA North Miami addresses issues of rupture as the films play on a timer,” states Platow. “Sala has created an environment in which the visitor’s focus is directed toward specific films that engage in a particular dialogue with each other, with the space, and the experience of the viewer. The lighting of the space and the drums follow the same sequence the artist has developed for the screenings. As some of the films end, they completely disappear and different films in other areas of the museum begin. The orientation of the installation is constantly changing, causing viewers to reorient themselves within the space as various films end and begin.”

“I want to think about the space every time it is in question because my work is space-bound,” Sala said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist for a monograph on his work. “When you’re offered a show and given a space to work with, it is an invitation. My concern is how to invite the space back... I like to think about how a work connects to the space each time, and I want it to be as different as it can be. There is a point where you do not use the space just to show your work, but you use your work to release the space.”

“Anri Sala belongs to the last generation of artists to come of age under Albania’s strict communist regime, which demanded absolute conformity to Social Realism. By the time he entered the Art Academy, communism had collapsed, and he and other artists reflected on the changes that transpired in the country almost overnight, while also catching up with the international art world,” notes Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA executive director and chief curator and curator of the Albanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007. She further remarks, “His early works explored the ideological discussions that preoccupied his country and the role art can play in engineering social change. This led to his more recent work that explores ways light, sound and images can create a social space that mobilizes viewers and heightens their sensitivity to their environment.”

As Director and Chief Curator of the CAC, Platow’s curatorial vision invites artists to engage in a dialogue between artwork and their surrounding architecture. With the exhibition Anri Sala: Purchase Not By Moonlight, Platow emphasizes that “the films are present in the space in different ways. This show is carefully calibrated with the gallery spaces, and the works need both time and the visitor’s movement through the building to unfold.”

For both the exhibition at MOCA North Miami and the CAC, Sala includes several drums especially fabricated for the exhibition. Synched with particular films, the drumsticks respond to the low-frequency rhythm of the films’ soundtracks, a furtive, yet direct connection between musical instruments and the sound component of a particular narrative.

The films Mixed Behavior (2003), Air Cushioned Ride (2006), A Spurious Emission (2007), Long Sorrow (2005), Lak-kat (2004), and Answer Me (2008)explore Sala’s interest in films that create their own soundtracks as well as disconnect. Mixed Behavior presents a DJ on the roof of a building in Tirana on New Year’s Eve. As fireworks fill the sky and rain descends upon him, the DJ creates a soundtrack for the evening’s pyrotechnics. The line between music created by the DJ and the sound of exploding fireworks is blurred along with the question of whether the festivities are inspiring the music or the other way around. This scene of celebration is also eerily similar to images of bombs over Bagdad as seen on the news. Questions arise regarding the relationship between these benign New Year celebrations and acts of war.

Air Cushioned Ride is set in a parking lot of trucks under a bright blue sky. As the camera, situated in a moving car, travels around the parked trucks, the car’s radio music alternates between country and classic chamber music. This vacillating of musical genres is created by the effect of the size and placement of the trucks on local radio signals. Air Cushioned Ride’s companion piece, A Spurious Emission, was created through the transcription of Air Cushioned Ride’s soundtrack into a musical score, performed by an orchestra composed of both baroque and country musicians. The result is an auditory collage to which we have visual access.

Long Sorrow begins with an unknown, seemingly discarded object in the window of an empty apartment. Improvisational jazz constitutes the aural backdrop of the film that slowly zooms in on this forgotten object over the distance of the living space. As the camera moves in, it becomes clear that the “object” is in fact a person playing this music, perched outside the window, high above the ground. The film explores sound at the moment it is created, focusing on the musician’s mouth and eyes rather than the instrument. The sound exists as an extension of the architecture, taking on a physical presence.

Lak-kat (which translates to gibberish) is a film of children learning the regional Sengalese language Wolof. The filmexplores the musicality of language or the moment when language is nothing more then sound. In Wolof many of the words for colors have been lost and replaced with French words, yet there remains a great variety of words describing shades of black and white. Filmed in low light reminiscent of the twilight hours, three children and a teacher practice an array of Wolof words provided by Sala. Shots of the children speaking are juxtaposed to images of moths clinging to a florescent light—the sole source of illumination in the room. The film is differently subtitled depending on which country it is presented as to reflect the nuances in each word’s meaning. The words take on a musical cadence, which does not always align with the white subtitles that flash on the bottom of the screen.  

Sala filmed the exhibition’s most recent work Answer Me in the Buckminster Fuller-created dome of a former surveillance tower between East and West Berlin. We see a man playing a drum set oriented toward the dome’s curved wall and a woman in front of an opening that overlooks a forest. Next to her are a single drum and drumsticks. She is trying to communicate her perceived breakdown of their relationship and the need to separate. She urges him to respond: “Answer me!” But he can’t hear her voice because he’s preoccupied with playing the drums. Even when he stops, the echo of his drums travels through the curveliniar space and animate the single drum next to the woman, jeopardizing the slightest possibility to ever receive her urgent words.

Time After Time (2003) explores ideas of disconnect as it shows a lone, emaciated horse on a highway. Often appearing as an absence rather than a presence in the film due to its being backlit, the horse slowly comes in and out of focus and then is suddenly illuminated by oncoming traffic. Whenever a car passes, the horse lifts its back leg. There is no provided reason of the horse’s location, only speculation.   

Many of the films presented at the CAC and MOCA North Miami explore the idea of echo. In Lak-kat students echo their teacher’s Wolof words; Long Sorrow confronts the viewer with the reverberations of jazz off surrounding buildings; Natural Mystic utilizes echoes to emulate the sound of fighter planes approaching and leaving; Answer Me reflects this theme through the echo of a drum set that prevents one of the protagonists from being heard. This theme is further elaborated upon in the installation through the presence of drums which echo to the low frequency waves created by the films.

Using musical instruments and film, Sala creates a choreographed experience that unfolds in synchrony with the architecture. All the films together are presented as a unified installation, and could almost be considered a single artwork. The installation’s most intriguing medium is duration: the passage of time is as important as the visual and aural characteristics of Sala’s work.

In addition to creating captivating narratives in film and videos, Sala’s work also revolves around socio-political change and unrest. “Anri Sala has created works like no other dealing with the tremendous political and social changes in his home country, Albania, since the communist system toppled,” says Platow. “He returns to his own roots without nostalgia but finds the spaces and moments that open up the possibility of freedom and change.”

Catalog

Sala’s first US publication—an illustrated catalog with essays by Svetlana Boym, Michael Fried, Raphaela Platow, Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA , North Miami Executive Director and Chief Curator—will accompany the exhibition.

Anri Sala was born in Tirana, Albania in 1974. He studied at the National Academy of Arts in Tirana and at Ecole nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Since 1995, his work has been exhibited extensively in Europe, but also in North America, Asia and Australia. Sala has won several awards for his films, and was awarded the prestigious Young Artist Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and was nominated for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize (2002). Sala lives and works in Berlin.

Exhibition Funding

Anri Sala: Purchase Not By Moonlight is made possible with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional support provided by Starbucks Coffee Company and Monica Kalpakian. The exhibition Anri Sala: Purchase Not By Moonlight launches the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Knight Exhibition Series.