Anri Sala

This exhibition by Albanian artist Anri Sala at the CCA will be his first-ever presentation in Poland. Sala?s works, which he produces in various parts of the world, incessantly escape all established categories and interpretational schemes. Born in 1974 in Tirana, the artist received a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in that city, and went on to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at the Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing (film and video). In his works, he combines techniques from two realms of art ? the moving image and painting. His captivating visual projects on the one hand constitute a penetrating analysis of culture and the human condition as determined by place and political context, and on the other an exploration of the language of imagery, codes of visual communication and structures of film narration. His work is based on personal analysis of intimate, entwining stories and on the exploration changing society and how it affects individuals. Many of his projects relate to the identity of individuals who function at the fringes of multiple cultures. Anri Sala is currently on a one-year arts fellowship at DAAD in Berlin, where he is preparing a vast project for the Neue Nationalgalerie. He recently took part in the International Film Festival prepared by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 2004 he had solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, the ARC Musée d?Art Moderne in Paris, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London. He has also exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Vienna (2003), the Dallas Museum of Art (2002), De Appel in Amsterdam (2000) and MAMCO in Geneva (2000). Sala received the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale of Art in 2001. He is represented by the Chantal Crousel Gallery in Paris and by Hauser & Wirth (Zurich?London).

This exhibition at the CCA will include Dammi i colori (2003), a film about a utopian project under which buildings in Tirana were painted on the initiative of the city?s mayor (himself a painter), and Mixed Behavior (2003), a work produced on New Year?s Eve in the Albanian capital. Some of Anri Sala?s films explore the phenomenon of light and its effects. This is true of Ghost Games (2002), which demonstrates the reactions of crabs to flashlight beams, Blindfold (2002), in which a sunrise is reflected in urban billboards, and Time After Time (2004), in which the figure of a horse emerges from darkness lit by the headlights of an automobile. Lakkat (2004), a work produced in Senegal, is an analysis of the mechanism by which certain words denoting colors are disappearing from the Wolof language, in which paradoxically there is a richness of terms denoting black and white, the words for which differ according to whether they apply to skin color or the color of light. The exhibition will also include two series of the artist?s photographs.

Pressetext

Anri Sala
Kurator: Milada Aliziska