TURIN.- Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea is presenting the solo show by Anri Sala (Tirana, 1974). One of the most prominent contemporary artists on the international scene, Anri Sala lives and works in Berlin. He represented France at the 2013 Venice Biennale and took part in important exhibitions at the Castello di Rivoli, including the group shows Faces in the Crowd, 2005, and Colori, 2017.
Beginning in 2000, Anri Sala has produced film and sound installations, sculptures, photographs, and drawings that explore the fractures, the intervals, the overlaps and the echoes through which reality unfolds through time, and events become meaningful. The artist uses architecture to shape visual, sound, and tactile elements so as to generate new interpretations and unique possibilities of perception within a liberating vision of language and culture.
References to music are an integral part of Anri Sala’s practice and are one of the elements shared by the works on display at the Castello di Rivoli. Conceived for the galleries at the Castello, the exhibition presents in an innovative organic itinerary some of the most significant film works made by Anri Sala in recent years, including Ravel Ravel (2013), Take Over (2017), and If and Only If (2018), as well as the sculpture Bridges in the Doldrums (2016).
Visitors are welcomed by Bridges in the Doldrums. A three-part arrangement for clarinet, saxophone and trombone, this work, embodied by drums, has been constructed solely from the bridges of seventy-four pop, jazz and folk songs from different periods and geographies, compiled in order of tempo, building a gradual sense of progressive acceleration with the three wind instruments trading roles. “The bridge alienates the listener from the song itself, keeping one’s attention while suspending one’s expectations, until the chorus returns to reconfirm their acquaintance with it.”
Each of the film works investigates a specific relation. Ravel Ravel stages the simultaneous performances of two different pianists playing the famous Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, composed by Maurice Ravel between 1929 and 1930. The concert was commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his arm during World War I. In the words of Anri Sala: “My intention is to bring out the resonance of a space consecutive to the temporal lag between the two performances and, through the repetition of the same notes, to induce the impression of an echo in an entirely muted space where the absorption of the sound reflections annihilates all sense of space.”
In Take Over, the artist explores the possible meanings that arise by juxtaposing La Marseillaise and L’Internazionale, compositions whose complex stories sometimes intermingle. Composed in 1792 by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, La Marseillaise became the distinctive symbol of the French Revolution, and later spread to other countries to become a symbol of political freedom. In the late 19th century, L’Internazionale was the anthem of labor movements and promoted ideals of equality and solidarity. Written in 1871, the lyrics to L’Internazionale were initially sung to the music of La Marseillaise. In 1888, Pierre de Geyter wrote the music and it ultimately became the anthem of the internationally inspired Socialist movement. Referencing the aspects shared by these two famous pieces of music, including any possible distances and differences, Sala’s work stages two performances, one by a pianist, and the other by a mechanical piano.
This exhibition represents the world presentation in a public museum of If and Only If, a film in which the artist’s attention focuses on the relationship between the movement of a snail and that of the musician Gérard Caussé as he plays the Elegy for Solo Viola by Igor Stravinsky (1944) on his viola. With poetic delicateness, the film presents the snail as it moves along the musician’s bow and the variations made by the animal’s slightest movements, or when it stands still, upon the overall performance, thus creating music in collaboration between human and non-human. “The Elegy is subverted through the tactile interaction between the musician and the snail, its duration revised to almost double its usual time. The music – Sala says – elongates into a journey that becomes a tangible part of its musical rearrangement.”
Like the components of an unusual orchestra, the three film works on display at the Castello have been reproposed by the artist in order to produce a highly synesthetic immersive experience. According to the artist’s project, the screenings unfold along a wall that crosses through the consecutive rooms. The “parade” has a total duration of about 38 minutes.
AS YOU GO, the title provided by the artist for this exhibition, underlines the idea of a flow of images in motion
and multiple stories, inviting spectators to choose if they want to physically move with the images or enjoy them by remaining still. More than a presentation of three interconnected film works, the overall exhibition may be interpreted like a device that can transform the screenings into a single, gigantic “moving sculpture.”
