Anri Sala

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.

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.

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.

A film by Anri Sala

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.

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

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

Long Sorrow (2005), filmed on a public housing estate in Berlin, is an enigmatic record of a performance orchestrated by the artist. Sala invited noted free jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc to perform while suspended outside the window of an empty apartment on the eighteenth floor. For the Serpentine, Sala staged the performance 3-2-1 (2011), in which saxophonists Andre Vida and Caroline Kraabel responded live to Long Sorrow in a series of daily performances. 3-2-1 begins with one of these saxophonists accompanying an audio recording of Moondoc’s improvisation with his own earlier performance on film, resulting in a ‘trio’: the film, the audio recording and the live performance. The saxophonist at the Serpentine then played live with Long Sorrow, a ‘duet’, before finally performing a solo after the film ended. 3-2-1 punctuated the fixed cycle of the show with an improvised element, integrating the strands of film and performance that run through Sala’s work.

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

Upon entering the installation of Anri Sala’s Now I see (2004), his first 35-mm film, the viewer is enveloped in total darkness. The effect is, at first, purposefully disorienting; then a flicker of light flashes upon a 10 x 12 foot screen. A second or two later, the face of a young man emerges from the pitch-black along with the pulse of an electric guitar. What follows seems to adhere to fairly standard conventions of rock video, with its guitar antics and male posturing, until a dog-shaped balloon falls on to the stage and disrupts the scene.

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.

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

A fim by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

A film by Anri Sala

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.

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

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.