
2022.12.17 SUN.
WINSING ART PLACE
“I’ve realized that all these works are about pairs, and the tensions between them.” — Anri Sala
Music, in its broadest sense, refers to the composition of pitch, tone and rhythm, and the meaning and understanding of music varies from culture to culture. The music in Anri Sala's work is not so much about the composition of the sound as it is about the traces of history it has experienced, like a vessel that carries a story, an interwoven narrative that flows through people's minds. Sala's creative career has been marked by a series of video installations that fuse music, sounds and images to depict the connection between the present moment and the historical era. In contrast to traditional video, Sala employs incidental music as an important narrative medium, in lieu of language, to recount the past, memories and the passing of time, evoking our perceptions and reflections of time and space through an immersive experience. The title of the exhibition, AS YOU GO, suggests the notion of dynamics. Based on the flow of music and images, the show is like a “parade,” giving the viewer the feeling of being part of it.
The piece on display, AS YOU GO, consists of three videos, “Ravel, Ravel,” “Take Over” and “If and only if.” “Ravel, Ravel” is composed through a re-arranged performance by Sala, a new interpretation of Maurice Ravel's Left Hand Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which resonates in the space between the two performances due to the time gap between them; “Take Over,” revolving around the politically and historically entangled Marseillaise and The Internationale, played by a pianist and a player piano, deals with their musical lineage and the ever evolving political symbolism; “If and only if” is a reinterpretation of the composer Igor Stravinsky's Elegy, in which a crawling snail and a fiddler interact in a delicately balanced relationship that makes the musical arrangement tangible. "AS YOU GO" is not only an interweaving of three video pieces, it is a projection installation as well as a unique and gigantic kinetic sculpture.
Deeply inspired by the development of Albanian history, Sala's artworks encompass photography, painting, video installations and performance, with the combination of video and incidental music being his signature and preferred means of expression. He once said that for him, the film is not about telling the story, it’s about reliving an experience, how to revive things without telling them. Beyond the punning approach to his creations, Sala also creates a new zone of perception for the viewer in the interval between time and space. Sala's notion of time can be traced back to his study of fresco painting at the National Academy of Arts Tirana in 1992, an ancient painting technique that requires a great deal of time to wait, layering and stacking paint, and this layering of time and image gradually translated into his later video works.
