Anri Sala

Anri Sala is well known for his work in video and photography. He has long been as interested in the construction of light, sound and space, as in the potential that lies within their interference, and in the subversion of hierarchies within the traditional image/sound/viewer relationship. In the current exhibition the artist anchors his investigation of image and sound within the context of architecture, ambient noise, quotidian observation, and narrative encounter to frame and create four new works. The artist writes, “What I call place is where one remembers having been, which is not only made of space but also of time; it needs to be both, own its proper qualities, whether they are architecture, sounds, or events. Some places have no buildings or dates to be remembered, but they produce their own soundtrack. “Long Sorrow" says Sala, is the result of a “rather particularly set-up situation, rather than a narrative structure. Its more a succession of tinted situations, colored by moments of tension, gestures and music that can make you feel". The location for this event is Märkische Viertel, an area in North Berlin with dense apartment buildings, close to where the wall used to be, built between 1965 and 1974 as a new concept of building. The longest building here is nicknamed by its inhabitants Lange Jammer (Long Sorrow). In the film, suspended outside of the top floor of the building, the free jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc responds to the city around him, improvising a piece with only his head visible through the window from inside the apartment. Sala positions his subject in suspension, such that the experience of place and sound is itself a prolongation of the architecture of the ‘long sorrow’.