Sometimes, although it’s rare, formal propositions can actually be politically influential. When the two meet, it’s a beautiful intersection. Albanian artist, Anri Sala, loves intersections; specifically the intersection of language, syntax, history and cultural memory. His primary medium is film, but his work encompasses a larger range to include performance and installation. Anri Sala is the winner of the 2011 Absolut Art Award, a Swedish annual award donned to an artist of significant merit. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Sala to discuss his latest work. |
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“The syntax had changed. It no longer served the same reality.”
Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph of the artist.
Around The World: Jason Stopa Interviews Anri Sala
Sometimes, although it’s rare, formal propositions can actually be politically influential. When the two meet, it’s a beautiful intersection. Albanian artist, Anri Sala, loves intersections; specifically the intersection of language, syntax, history and cultural memory. His primary medium is film, but his work encompasses a larger range to include performance and installation. Anri Sala is the winner of the 2011 Absolut Art Award, a Swedish annual award donned to an artist of significant merit. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Sala to discuss his latest work.
Jason Stopa: My first introduction to your work was Give Me The Colors (2003) which is on view at Tate Modern in London. That work reflects on the transformation of Tirana, replete with a conversation with Tirana’s mayor, Edi Rama. Taxiing around the city, Rama discusses politics, art, and social issues as we, as viewers, slowly notice how the entire city is hand-painted. This dynamic is incredibly powerful in that the work posits these two distinct aspects into the same “conversation,” so to speak.
Anri Sala: Yes, there is a sense of translation from one medium to another. The colors of the city, which is an act of transformation, and the discussion, which is focused on transformation in a larger sense.
JS: When did this interest in a rupture between mediums begin?
AS: It began with my film entitled Intervista (1998). While in the process of moving into a new home with my family, I discovered a twenty-year-old 16mm newsreel film, containing images of a congress of the Albanian Communist Party. To my surprise I recognized my mother giving a speech, and later being interviewed. But I could not make out what she was saying, because the sound had been lost.
So I went to a school for the listening impaired. They were able to decipher the words by mouthing the words on film. What was most surprising was to hear how the language was used. 30 years ago it was used to serve the system. And the syntax had changed. It no longer served the same reality. Syntax is interesting in that it becomes translated and, as a result, altered. I’m interested when there is a rupture in the syntax.
JS: I really think it comes across in a more direct, but also strange way in the film Spurious Emission, where two songs are competing for the same radio frequency.
AS: Yes, in Spurious Emission. The country song and the symphony made for an unexpected contrast.
JS: On a side note, are you interested in noise or noise music?
AS: Not necessarily, or not as a genre of music per say. But, I do enjoy using noise and sound as a medium. I’m interested in everything before it becomes articulated: the moment prior to music.
JS: I feel as though time is another medium that you are using in a discursive way. There are ruptures, as you say, in the way you are using time. Memory, history, and reality collude into an indefinable structure that is startling and also enlightening. As we talk about language in depth it strikes me that there might be a connection to post-structuralism. I’m curious what your background was whilst growing up …
AS: Growing up in a closed society, without popular movies, or literature, things had to come in “under the radar”, so to speak. We were forbidden to have any foreign magazines or books, but when things did trickle in, they did not respect chronology. First, we would get music or a book from the 80’s, and then something else from the 70’s. This was an interesting social rupture. Things did not flow organically. I’m sensitive to it, but not necessarily in a theoretical way. I enjoy theory, but the work comes first.
JS: Is there also a sense of utopia or hope? That somehow formal changes in our world can bring about political changes, social changes?
AS: I think you could say that. In the narratives, in the films, people are projected onto the screen while we are also projected onto them. We identify with their time, sounds, and architecture. I want to create an open structured reality in film that also opens itself up to an open structure in the world. In the syntax of mediums, I juggle, I play with the syntax. Ultimately, when you open up the medium you open it up to new meanings.
*** This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.