ART-PRESENTATION:Anri Sala

Anri Sala’s work explores the moment between the tangible and intangible. It exists somewhere between a time and a space, perhaps even ricocheting between the two. Sala’s thought-provoking and evocative time-based work goes to often difficult places, giving voice to thoughts, feelings and events for which language is not enough.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthaus Bregenz Archive

Originally planned for 2020, Anri Sala’s exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, is opening today. Musical phenomena play a major role in Anri Sala’s work. His transformative, time-based works develop from a dense network of relations between sound, image, and architecture. A recurring medium in the exhibition is film. In contrast to conventional cinema, Sala does not employ a strict narrative or even actors, it is rather musical pieces that become the real protagonists in the works. The cinematic results from the musical and not, as is customary, vice versa, enabling visitors to immerse themselves in a both visual and acoustic experience of the space. Recent and entirely new works are on view in the exhibition. A record player, floating freely in an abandoned space capsule, a subtle alternating between the architecture’s contours being sharp or blurred, a garden snail slowly moving along a viola bow, a vintage wallpaper-printing roller whose metal pattern is translated into spectral sounds.  Among them is a monumental installation that combines film, sound and installation, tapping into the sense of equanimity of above and below that the artist associates with the ‘Space City’. Titled “Time No Longer” (2021)  the immersive work is inspired by African American astronaut and saxophonist Ronald McNair, who was launched on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 with the intention of recording music in space. Had the rocket not exploded seconds after take-off, he would have.  In the recording, it’s hard to distinguish one instrument from the other, a deliberate effect. “Sometimes it sounds like one and sometimes like the other. It is also playing with this idea that the clarinet might sound like a saxophone before it exists, in a sense asking what would a song sound like before it plays?” The work “If and Only If” (2018), is based on Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola, also charts the course of a journey, which too becomes an integral part of its musical composition. In this case, a snail gradually travels the full length of a viola bow, innocuously moving across it, but minutely disrupting the exquisite balance on which the maestro’s playing instinctively relies. This traversal emulates a concealed dialogue between two voices that is subtly implied at the heart of the composition. The work is performed as a monologue, but it is in an allusion to dialogue, in the form of the sound of two strings, that Sala renders Stravinsky’s Elegy as a tactile interaction between the renowned violist Gérard Caussé and a garden snail. The snail, its location and pace imposing itself on the performance, causes the viola player to simultaneously make adjustments for and thus compose with this evolving situation. The standard duration of Elegy is thus subverted through the interaction between the musician and the snail, revised to almost double its usual time. “The Last Resort” is a sound and sculpture installation reimagining W.A. Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622”, with a weather-beaten interpretation and the addition of thirty-eight snare drums.  The open structure houses 38 especially constructed snare drums, suspended from the ceiling in an up-side down position. The ensemble of drums is a self-playing sculpture. Each of the drums is custom-made and conceals two in-built speakers: a low range speaker whose low frequencies incite vibrations on the drum skin, triggering in return the response of the drumsticks that create the characteristic rat-a-tat, and a high- and midrange speaker that plays audible musical fragments. The snare drums also function as visible markers of the sound of the installation. The musical starting point of The Last Resort is the “Clarinet concerto in A major, K. 622”, composed by Mozart in 1791, shortly before his death. The snare drums are animated by the Mozart’s concerto, in a recording that Sala rearranged according to specific conditions.

Photo: Anri Sala, Time No Longer, 2021, Installation view third floor, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2021, Photo: Markus Tretter, © Anri Sala, Bildrecht Wien, 2021, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Info: Kunsthaus Bregenz, Karl-Tizian-Platz,  Bregenz, Austria, Duration: 17/7-10/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at