In February 2016, the New Museum will present a major exhibition of the work of Anri Sala, whose innovative and rigorous work has garnered critical acclaim. Though Sala has exhibited internationally since the late 1990s, "Anri Sala: Answer Me" will mark his first solo presentation at a New York museum. The exhibition will be on view from today, February 3, through April 10, 2016.
Highlighting Sala's poetic and conceptual approaches to music, sound, and architecture, the exhibition will feature elaborate multichannel audio and video installations that will unfold on three of the Museum's floors, composing a symphonic experience specific to the New Museum. The artist's video works often depict fragments of everyday life that double as portraits of society, and in his installations, Sala exposes how communication can occur outside the limits of language as well as how sounds can affect our perception of time and space. In recent works, Sala has focused on forms of classical music, and the exhibition at the New Museum will include his striking two-film installation Ravel Ravel (2013), which debuted in his solo presentation for the French Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, Margot Norton, Associate Curator, and Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator.
In his early video works from the late 1990s, Sala used documentary strategies to examine life after communism in his native Albania, observing the role of language and memory in narrating social and political histories. Since the early 2000s, his video works have probed the psychological effects of acoustic experiences, embracing both music and sound as languages capable of conjuring up images, rousing nostalgia, or communicating emotions. In subtle visual narratives, Sala often depicts what appear to be fragments of everyday life, and his intimate observations experiment with fiction to double as enigmatic portraits of society. Unusual locations frame seemingly accidental situations in video works like Long Sorrow (2005), Answer Me (2008), Le Clash (2010), and Tlatelolco Clash (2011). Evoking a sense of suspension through repetition and stasis, Sala composes scenes in which the protagonists appear strangely disconnected from their environments and music resounds as a requiem for the utopian histories that lie dormant in the modernist architecture surrounding them.
In recent works, Sala has interpreted musical compositions in multichannel video and sound installations that emphasize the perception of sound in relation to architectural spaces. This exhibition will include a new spatialization of Sala's works The Present Moment (in D) (2014) and The Present Moment (in B-flat) (2014), in which he rearranges
Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht" [Transfigured Night] (1899) to create the sense that individual notes, abstracted from the composition, are traveling freely throughout the gallery before accumulating and playing in repetition as if trapped in a spatial impasse. In the installation Ravel Ravel, two interpretations of
Maurice Ravel's "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D-major" (1929-30) are projected simultaneously in an anechoic chamber. Sala rearranged the tempo of each performance so that they play both in and out of sync to produce a musical echo, generating a paradoxical experience in the sound-absorbing interior of the installation. The dynamics of repetition and reverberation-rhetorical and compositional tropes in Sala's works-underpin the ideas explored in the exhibition and acknowledge the historical dialogues embedded throughout the artist's oeuvre.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue including contributions by Natalie Bell, Tacita Dean, Massimiliano Gioni, Mark Godfrey, Boris Groys, and Christine Macel.
Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania, and lives and works in Berlin. He represented France at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and has exhibited internationally for many years, with solo shows at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2012); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2009); the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2008); and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2005); among other venues. Sala has received the Vincent Award (2014), the 10th Benesse Prize (2013), the Absolut Art Award (2011), and the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale (2001). He has taken part in many group exhibitions and biennials, including the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013), the 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), the 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007), and the 4th Berlin Biennial (2006).
"Anri Sala: Answer Me" is made possible by the lead support of Lonti Ebers and Bruce Flatt and Maja Hoffmann/the LUMA Foundation. Special thanks to Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Hauser & Wirth. Additional thanks to kurimanzutto, Mexico City, and Esther Schipper, Berlin. The accompanying exhibition publication is made possible, in part, by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
For more information, visit
newmuseum.org.
Image: Anri Sala, Ravel Ravel, 2013 (detail). Two-channel HD video and sixteen-channel sound installation, color; 20:45 min. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Hauser & Wirth. © Anri Sala.
