Anri Sala

First introduced in France during the exhibition, Voilà, le monde dans la tête, hosted in Paris Museum of modern art in the year 2000, the artist, Anri Sala, presents this time five recent video films, two of them are entirely originals.

It is in this tenuous change from light to darkness - the moment of twilight when one can hardly distinguish a dog from a wolf - that the present work of Anri Sala falls. The artificial light shed on the scene punctuates the action in each of the films projected. Every subject, then, as if de-realized becomes ghostly. Shooting her movies in different places throughout the world, the artist elaborates, from reality, her mini scripts without ever committing her work to a true narrative process. Throughout the exhibition, the animal on one side and the sound on the other, appear as two essential features.

time after time (Tirana, 2003): a horse, almost brought to a standstill on the side of a motorway at the entry of a town - depicted in a proximity as much queer as disturbing, echoes the solitude and the violence that are inherent to the city.

Ghostgames (North Carolina, 2002): uses the ambivalent mode, inspired by a ball game, to present models of human and animal intercourse.

Mixed Behaviour (Tirana, 2003): on a rainy night of the New Year's Eve, a lonely DJ from above the city, invents, like a magician, sounds that interact with the light.

In Làkkat (Senegal, 2004) three children repeat insistently different words that refer to light and darkness in Wolof, thus, putting the meaning to the test of the very musicality of the language and to a shadowy light that stimulates the ear.

Dammi i colori (Tirana, 2003) : an urbanistic project aiming at re-establishing the links between citizens and their town has had the façades covered with bright colours in a shade/light passage that calls the attention of protagonists.

The choice almost obsessive of a certain view point and a favoured way to convey time in its different stages ( the animal stage, childhood...), arouse a kind of new slowness that is likely to restore to the world its original one, that of the living.

Anri Sala was born in Tirana (Albania) in 1974. He lives and works in Paris. Pressetext

Anri Sala - Entre chien et loup / When the night calls it a day
L'exposition Anri Sala a bénéficié du soutien généreux de :
Kuratoren: Laurence Bossé, Julia Garimorth, Hans Ulrich Obrist