Anri Sala +
Anri Sala is an Albanian-French artist whose primary medium is video.
Last week in Paris we saw his huge-scale, immersive work Time No Longer at the recently opened Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection.
TNL starts with a piece of music written by French composer Olivier Messiaen called Quartet for the End of Time, which he composed while in a German prisoner of war camp in 1941.
Sala's version of the quartet was reshaped as an elegy to physicist/astronaut/musician Ronald McNair, who died in the space shuttle Challenger accident in 1986.
McNair had been planning to record Messiaen's piece in outer space.
On a saxophone.
The original was written for piano, violin, cello and clarinet, which were the instruments available to Messiaen in the stalag where he was detained.
So some significant musical re-arranging was required for the piece.
The visuals that Sala chose to accompany the music feature a record-player turntable, tumbling in space, and something like planetary horizons that blur as they spin past.
A black, vinyl record on the turntable catches light and echoes the glass cupola that covers the gallery.
Everything about TNL is high resolution (sight, sound, motion) and presented on a tall, curved screen in the open space of the Bourse.
The bend of the screen perfectly fits its section of the round gallery, and as some reviewers have commented the combination is (outer space pun alert) "out of this world".
The gallery space is quite large and one can stand or sit and watch the piece as it loops, and take-in the oldness and newness of the place.
In the side and lower galleries of the Bourse Pinault, additional works by Sala includeTakeover (showing fingers mysteriously interacting with a piano keyboard) and 1,395 Days Without Red (a woman walking while humming a familiar tune).
This exhibition was my first exposure to Sala, and I'm sure it will not be my last.
I will write about the Bourse Pinault another time.
