ART CITIES:Paris-Anri Sala
Anri Sala’s works of film, sculpture and installation create poetic analogies that reflect on life and culture from different frames of experience. Past works have traversed European contexts, from his hometown, Tirana, to Germany and France where he has spent much of his adult life. His films balance allegorical and symbolic subjects, presented as simple narratives that often creatively pair image with sound, and explore the choreographic potential of musical instruments and their performers.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Chantal Crousel Archive
Anri Sala in his solo exhibition “If and Only If”, at Galerie Chantal Crousel, presents two new films and a series of drawings and sculptures. Anri Sala before his studies at the University of Arts (UART) in Tirana, after which he attended the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, to study violin for seven years and this experience helped him develop “an idea about musical tempo, and how to speak with musicians”. In the main space of the Gallery is projected Sala’s new film, “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 artist once said that he likes to see “Films as sculptures, in which the way you view the work is sequenced and time-coded”. Sala’s latest film “Slip of the Line” (2018) oscillates between the magic of work and the work of magic. Located in a glass manufacture, the film follows the transition of the amorphous matter from its molten state to a wine glass. The meticulous choreography of their interrelated actions grants the craftsmen’s labour an hypnotic allure. As the making of the glasses takes us through the different stages of their fabrication, the customary production cycle is hijacked by an unusual slip: the intervention of a magician who bends the wine glasses, bestowing upon the assembly line the traits of an enchanted realm. Three unique glass objects entitled “Resting Spells” (2018) –absorbed by the magic intervention thus taken away from the production process, will be exhibited by the entrance of the gallery, as frozen witnesses of this singular action. A series of works on paper “Untitled (Maps/Species)” (2018) is on display in the adjacent wooden floor room, showing manipulated maps of countries and geopolitical territories. These mutated representations of land mass fit the boundaries of the found XVIII century etchings of biological species, whose shapes were often constrained within the arbitrary frame in order to facilitate classification.
Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, (Entrance: 5 rue de Saintonge), Paris, Duration: 15/10-24/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com
