Anri Sala

Film follows a woman walking this very route. She stops, hesitates, runs. She waits, calculates and bends down. Every crossing is a new challenge and new calculation.

Anri Sala created the encounter between his Albanian heritage – a snapshot of the famous Studio Marubi, which had introduced photography into the Balkans as from end of the 19TH century – and a masterpiece of French art – Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édouard Manet – in an incongruous juxtaposition. We can see three women in traditional costume busying themselves around a sewing machine; the view is frontal, the pose frozen, a pure “Studio Marubi” snapshot. The insertion of a detail from Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe within this image looks like an “accidental encounter” introducing colours and nudity into a very classic photo. The characters in Déjeuner are gradually “swallowed up” by the sewing machine which soon will have finished weaving a traditional dress for the naked young woman painted by Manet, making her similar to the seamstresses. In less than a minute and in a manner apparently light even poetic, Anri Sala touches on the main themes so dear to this work.

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Although many of Sala’s works address personal histories—his own and those of others—their themes of trauma, loss, and recovery are universal. Using tropes of both documentary and fictional filmmaking, Nocturnes (1999) approaches these themes in an uneasy exploration of insomnia and personal isolation. The film offers a brief but telling glimpse into the lives and psyches of two men Sala met while studying art in Turcoing, France: Jacques, who collects and obsessively cares for thousands of fish, and Denis, who copes with disturbing memories of his service as a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia by playing violent video games.

A film by Anri Sala

Sala didn’t paint the Tirana facades in Dammi i Colori (Give Me the Colors), in his current show. Others did, as part of an ongoing project initiated by Edi Rama, the city’s mayor and a former artist.

A film by Anri Sala

Igor Stravinsky composed Elegy for Viola in 1994 “so that Germain Prévost could play it in memory of Alphonse Onnou, founder of the Pro Arte Quartet”. Tribute and lament, the piece is played here by Gérard Caussé, assisted, if one can say so, by a garden banded snail. Riding the bow, the gastropod goes from the bottom to the top of the stick during the music. The title, which is a logic expression that imposes a double condition simultaneously, points to the link between animal and human, between music and silence, between seeing and listening, between two astonishments, two sliding virtuosities.

In this video, the Albanian artist presents an unusual situation by focusing on a static plane, as spiders build their webs over a stoplight, without fearing the tension that the latter create.

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

Two Senegalese boys are instructed in the proper pronunciation of their native Wolof; their introduction to language becomes the process through which they classify and order their own social and racial identity.

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

Sala's most recent work, Answer Me, 2008 was filmed in a Buckminster Fuller-created geodesic dome in Berlin, a former NSA surveillance tower, which was constructed on the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), an artificial hill made of rubble from West Berlin under which a building by Albert Speer was buried. The interior of this abandoned dome is characterized by an extraordinarily long echo, which provoked Sala to stage a story there "whose drama would come under the influence of the building". The narrative is inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni, who wanted to shoot the silences in a couple's break-up. In Answer Me, the stillness becomes a loud stillness of silencing decibels: a woman tries to end a relationship, but her lover refuses to listen, playing fiercely on a drum set to silence her. Next to her, the drumsticks resting on a single drum play to the echo of his drumming.

A film by Anri Sala

Intervista seeks to deal in microcosm with the issue of how Albanian communist-era elites have sought to justify their roles in the now-discredited regime that ruled the country for nearly half a century. This brief film offers some poignant vignettes of contemporary life in Albania... [and] also underscores the reluctance of Albania's former Communist elite to confront its past. Both the quality of its content and its length make Intervista a potentially valuable instructional resource

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala