MIXED BEHAVIOUR. Anri Sala

Tirana Art Center

MIXED BEHAVIOUR. Anri Sala
01.06.2014 - 14.07.2014

Tirana Art Center presents Anri Sala's "Mixed Behaviour" from june 1 until july 14, 2014. "Mixed Behaviour" embodies the most important themes and strategies of this artist’s oeuvre, including strikingly innovative play between foreground and background, light and dark, sound and picture.1 Here, a lone disc jockey filmed squarely from behind spins records on a Tirana rooftop. It is a rainy New Year’s Eve, and the man bends to his task covered by a plastic tarp while fireworks explode all around him, briefly illuminating the darkness; their clamor overlaps with the sound of gunfire, a local holiday tradition. Gradually, we realize that the video’s soundtrack plays in manipulated synchrony with the fireworks: like the Wizard of Oz under a clear plastic veil, the DJ appears to control a scene that stretches across the background like a movie screen or canvas. However, while the music proceeds in a predictable, linear fashion, seeming to conjure the fireworks in the distance, we realize that the images are periodically moving backward; almost undetectably, the fireworks are reversing, seeming to implode. This action suggests the practice of “scratching”— rapidly and repeatedly reversing the direction of a record on a turntable. As Mixed Behaviour shows us, Sala exploits the medium of digital video so comfortably and completely that his arrangement of digital image and accompanying sound offers an astonishingly new use of filmic art.

Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania. After studying at the Albanian Academy of Arts in Tirana (1992−1996), Sala moved to France, where he was enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1996−1998) and the Le Fresnoy studio in Tourcoing (1998−2000). His work has been selected for numerous biennials, including those in Berlin (2001, 2006), Moscow (2007), São Paulo (2002, 2010), Sydney (2006) and Venice (1999, 2001, 2003), Documenta 13 (2012), and he has had major solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien (2003), the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2008−2009), Serpentine Gallery in London (2012), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2013), New Museum New York (2016) among others. Sala was selected to represent France in the 55th edition of the Venice biennale. His works are in the collections of such prestigious institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Tate Modern (London). Sala currently lives and works in Berlin, and is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and London, Kurimanzutto in Mexico DF and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris.