Anri Sala
dal 13/5/2011 al 29/7/2011
Segnalato da
13/5/2011
Anri Sala
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Anri Sala searches to capture the influence of space on the creation of sound and reassesses its relationship to an image. The exhibition is imagined as an intersection of echoes and transpositions where the works reconstruct themselves in other moments and spaces. On the day of the opening the visitors will give their personal invitations to be inserted into a barrel organ player. In the form of a punch card, each invitation will trigger the playing of four distinct seconds of a well-known punk song. Randomly inserted into the organ, Invitations 2, 2011 produces a deconstructed offspring of the punk song.
The Chantal Crousel gallery is pleased to announce the fourth solo exhibition of Anri Sala at the
gallery.
Sound and music have an important place in the work of the artist. They’re the main focus of
the exhibition. Anri Sala searches to capture the influence of space on the creation of sound and
reassesses its relationship to an image. “Music has a gift to suggest images, I like the conflict between the
images evoked by music and the ones in a film.”1
The exhibition is imagined as an intersection of echoes and transpositions where the works
reconstruct themselves in other moments and spaces.
On the day of the opening, upon entering the gallery, the visitors will give their personal invitations
to be inserted into a barrel organ player. In the form of a punch card, each invitation will trigger
the playing of four distinct seconds of a well-known punk song. Randomly inserted into the organ,
Invitations 2, 2011 produces a deconstructed offspring of the punk song.
Like a strange echo, where disruption and continuance both play the same tune, from inside the
gallery, a familiar melody is heard. In the film Le Clash, 2010 from the interior of a bricked up
building, a once influential rock and punk venue, come the famous riff of a song. Slowly revolving
the handle of a barrel organ, two musicians stroll past the abandonned concert hall. The sounds of
the organ and their singing synchronize with the resonating riff, prompting a simultaneous stereo
effect. A man wanders around the place with a shoebox under his arm. Listening absentmindly,
he slowly turns a small handle that sets off - note by note - a different version of the same song.
When the distinct melodies conjoin, a sense of shifting reality occurs, hightlighting two differing
recollections of the punk song.
A music box is mounted on a window opposite the projection - previously camouflaged inside a
shoebox seen in Le Clash. No Window no Cry (Le Corbusier, Maison-atelier Lipchitz, Boulogne)3, 2011
enables the visitor to “play” the gallery space like an instrument. “Playing” the window, adds an
additional layer to the soundtrack of the film. An identical window in the Maison-atelier by Le
Corbusier allows the visitors to play the tune of the punk song to a different surrounding.
Score, 2001, allows the outdoor sounds and the music of inside the gallery space to interact with
each other. The score represented by the perforated cards from the barrel organ - has been mounted
sctulpturally on one of the gallery walls, an act that transposes sound into another materiality.
The gallery becomes an additionnal instrument, reminding the concert hall featured in Le Clash -
which is filled with music and - at the same time - letting it escape outside.
When The Clash ends, 5 Flutterbyes invades the gallery space reconfiguring it, disorienting and inciting
the viewer to follow the music where it leads him through the space.
An illuminated fan, previously used in the performance of 5 Flutterbyes4, is placed on one of the
skylight glass windows of the gallery. Based on the aria Vogliatemi bene, un bene picolino from Giacomo
Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, 5 Flutterbyes is a duet between five sopranos and two baritones. When
one soprano sings, the other sopranos withheld their voices to only mime the act of singing. The
instant the soprano suspends her voice another soprano takes over. Singing in turns from different
whereabouts, the five sopranos reveal a wandering presence of Madame Butterfly.
Why the Lion Roars, 2009 is a composition of feature films that communicate through a feeling for
temperature. Each of the fifty-seven selected films represents specifically defined degrees; from
minus 11°c to 45°c. A thermometer measures the temperature oustide the projection space and
simultaneously edits the film programme, which changes in correspondance with the actual outdoor
temperature. The commotions of weather dictate the films’ narrative. At the exact moment of an
increase or decrease in temperature; each films is interrupted and replaced by another, provoking an
unplanned collision of meaning- the films hibernate until their “season” comes. Why the Lion Roars
plays Chinese whispers with film. Some are seen as fragments as the temperature fluctuates widly in
the morning while other films are projected in the whole or even loop as the temperature stabilizes
later in the day. Endlessly edited by the fluctuation of the weather, Why the Lion Roars trusts the
climatic chance its unique convergence of fiction. A found future perpetually unsettles the present
at its own discretion.
Why the Lion Roars, the book, 2011 is a forecast journal, based on the weather in Paris.
A colour in assigned to each film: either one that has been singled out from a key scene or a colour
remnant of filmic memory.
Why the Lion Roars, photographs, 2011 is a series of 10 photographs that capture the instants, the
exact moments- at ten different days and time - when a film replaces another. If in the installation
a film replaces directly another and is abruptly cut, the photographic process - with necessary
exposure time - catches two temperatures. Each photographs brings two films at once.
Why the Lion Roars is the temperature-cut version of a fiction based on a true story : the weather.
1. In Quinn Latimer, Modern Painter, interview with Anri Sala, December 2008
2. Invitation was already performed in Mexico in 2011 and can be re-activated in other places or times.
3. The window is a custom-made duplicate of an original window of a private house built by Le Corbusier in Boulogne,
France. It adds to a series of windows where the artist already installed the music box: The Oscar Niemeryer Pavilion on
Sao Paulo, and the National Central Library of Mexico, UNAM built by Juan O’Gorman)
4. 5 Flutterbyes was originally performed in the Il Tempo del Postino group show at the Manchester International Festival in 2007. During the performance the opera house was plunged into darkness, only lit the flickering light of the fans.
Image: Anri Sala, Le Clash, 2010
HD video, dolby surround 5.1 sound / Vidéo HD, son dolby surround 5.1
8 min 31
Edition of/de 6
Opening may 14 2011
Galerie Chantal Crousel
10, rue Charlot, 75003 Paris
Opening hours Tuesday-Saturday 11AM - 1PM / 2PM - 7PM
free admission