Anri Sala

One of the strongest video installations that Montreal has seen in recent memory, Anri Sala’s survey at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, was a massive, immersive environmental installation. It attempted something altogether holistic and succeeded in ensnaring the viewer in a web of images and sounds that held our eyes and ears in delirious resonance. This was the Berlin-based artist’s first solo in Canada, and his largest in North America, and included a baker’s dozen of recent works, from videos and photographs to sculpture and an installation created in situ by the artist. The time Sala spent at the museum finessing the physical layout was well spent, the exhibition was dialogical at all levels and demonstrated dovetailing continuities throughout.

Immediately upon entering the exhibition, we experienced the aural component as powerfully cogent and integrated in the work, and almost hypnotic in quality. We were reminded of jazz musician Ornette Coleman’s oft-quoted sentiment to the effect that for him, if his music has no metric time, the time it does have is akin to breathing, and is natural and free. The sound of the 10 dispersed snare drums in Doldrums, 2008, was an invitation to the dance as we negotiated the main arteries of the exhibition. Think of a collision between Nouvelle Vague’s Dance With Me and the rhythmic splendour in the drumming of Warren “Baby” Dodds, with Sala as Pied Piper.

The improvisational nature of Sala’s sound has a genuinely cadenced emotional core. There is a dearth of pretension and artifice here. Attentive to the acoustic potential of the overall space, Sala led us through a measured labyrinth that was calibrated by subtle differences in the lighting, the sequencing of the films and an imagistic superabundance that, at times, threatened to swallow us whole.

Sala was born in Albania in 1974 and belongs to that last generation of artists who emerged out of the long shadow of an oppressive Communist regime to embrace the ideal of art not so much as social panacea as proverbial deliverance and life. The deep thema of his early videos such as Intervista, 1998, and Dammi i Colori, 2003, is profoundly autobiographical, unusually moving, and transcends any critique of totalitarianism. Sala frames and works from his mother’s engagement in Albanian Communist party politics. A lip-reader recovers words his mother forgot speaking on old film.

The theatricality of Sala’s videos gain momentum through the employment of sound, turning the exhibition halls into amplification chambers for the videos. Sound is no afterthought here but, rather, both premise and underpinning. This is certainly the case in Answer Me, 2008, in which a percussionist aggressively answers a lover’s plea for heartfelt dialogue with belligerent loud drumming, and also in Long Sorrow, “a requiem for the end of the dreams” in which free jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc improvises on a saxophone while suspended in a harness outside the window of an 18th-floor apartment in Berlin. The suspenseful improvisation clearly channels the anxiety of the situation. If, as some commentators aver, Sala’s films are becoming more and more abstract, Long Sorrow and other recent works convince us that this may well be the case.

Sala’s corpus is one that pulverizes narrative and installs disruptions in space and time even as it demonstrates just how coherent its author’s vision is. He has often been quoted as saying that his art, like his life, has been continuously shaped, inspired and constrained by rupture and transience. For all that, he has achieved a phenomenal coherence in meditations on the meaning of sound and “slowness.” Truly immersive and always enticing in scope and tenor, this exhibition’s improvisatory matrix not only heightened our sound awareness and delivered rare epiphanies in the process, but it also, and effortlessly, demonstrated the relationship between sound and silence. ❚

Anri Sala was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from February 3 to April 25, 2011.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator living in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.