Anri Sala

Anri Sala
October 12 – November 13, 2004
Opening reception: Tuesday, 12 October, 6-8 p.m.

 Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce our first exhibition with Anri Sala which will open to the public on Tuesday, October 12^th and will run through Saturday, November 13th.   A reception for the artist will be held on Tuesday, October 12th from 6 -8 pm.  Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm.

 This first solo show of Albanian artist Anri Sala  (b1974) at Marian Goodman Gallery will include 4 videos made between 2002 and 2004 - 'Dammi i Colori (2003), Mixed Behaviour (2003), Làk-kat (2004) and the brand new Untitled – as well as a new photographic edition. Shot in various parts of the world, Sala's films proceed with a continual slippage, 'reconciling light and shadow, the frontal and the tangent, precision and incertitude, stillness and dynamism, sound and silence, analytic acuity and blurry irresolution' to reveal ambiguities, interpretative equivocations, an in-betweenness, the indistinct spaces or forms of disorientation and imperceptibility. The undercurrent of his work is a fundamentally personal exploration of intimate and interwoven stories, exploring themes of a changing society and the individual.

 Dammi i Colori was first shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale as part of Utopia Station and this will be the first presentation in the US of this acclaimed work. It was filmed in Tirana during the winter of 2002-3 as Edi Rama, the city's artist-mayor put into action his idea of coloring the exterior walls of the city's drab apartment blocks as a symbol of hope and a temporary sign that basic changes to the city's infrastructure were on their way. Sala's film is not a documentary about Rama or Tirana but rather a set of reflections about the possibilities of color and the disparities in our different experiences of what utopia and reality can mean.

 The title of Sala's new photographic edition "A Thousand Windows", "The World of the Insane" refers to the names of the newspapers that emerged in Tirana after the changes in Albania and the opening of the country in 1990. Approximately 135 new titles had surfaced on improvised tables, street corners and kiosks around the city when these photographs were taken in 1992.

 In Mixed Behaviour (2003) a DJ mixes tracks on a rooftop in Tirana on New Year's Eve against a night sky full of fireworks. Sheltering from the rain under a plastic sheet, the DJ becomes an indistinct silhouette and yet it becomes clear in the blurred interface between sound and image that the DJ is not playing to an audience but playing to the sky, trying to 'control' the fireworks. Sometimes he misses and the music goes off in the rain but at other times he manages it so well that the forward and backward movements of the firework appear to depend on the movements of the music.

 Sala has spoken of his interest in language and sound and Làk-kat  (2004) plays on both the implications of language and abstract sound that results from the repetition of words. Làk-kat ( 'one whose native tongue is different from the language of the place where he is') was filmed in Senegal. Sala became interested in the way that in Wolof some original words – for green, blue or yellow, for example - have disappeared and have been replaced by French ones. Yet the Wolof language has a rich vocabulary for the shades between black and white in terms of skin, and also in terms of light or context. Sala discovers the transformation of these words through a journey of cultural implications, carrying the nuances into three different versions – French (as seen at his show at ARC, Paris 2004), and in both British English (as seen in London) and American English (to be premiered at Marian Goodman Gallery).  

We are very pleased to present Untitled for the first time. Filmed on a boat steered though the mangroves in Senegal, the film is a winding journey in which the image veers between an almost physical clarity and a transparent abstraction.

 Anri Sala (b. 1974 in Tirana, Albania) received the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale 2001 and the Prix Gilles Dusein, Paris in 2000, as well as several other documentary and film awards. He has had solo exhibitions at ARC Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2004), the Kunsthalle Wien (2003), the Dallas Museum of Art (2002), De Appel, Amsterdam (2000). And at MAMCO, Geneva (2000). In 2003 took part in the following group shows including Fast Forward. Media Art/Sammlung Goetz at the ZKM, Karlsruhe; Remind, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes; Tirana Biennale 2; Istanbul Biennale;  Moving Pictures, Guggenheim Bilbao; Utopia Station, Venice Biennale; Manfred Pernice – Neo Rauch – Francis Alys – Anri Sala, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Hardcore, Towards a New Activism, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

He will have a solo show at The Art Institute of Chicago in October and will also be included in Time Zones at Tate Modern, London.

 For further information or images, please call the gallery on 212 977 7160.