“What I call a 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, wether they are architecture, sounds or events.”
Anri Sala
(Notes on Air Cushioned Ride, 2006)

For this new exhibition at the Galerie Chantal Crousel, Anri Sala conceives and organizes a space where cycles and rotations are orchestrated on a tempo divided in three musical times of which one is silent. Each time lasts around 6 minutes. This particular timing reveals what becomes visible in between the cycles, enriched and affected by a previous experience. Anri Sala provokes and extends the qualities of improvisation defining its nuances and potential. He intensifies its specifics by recording them with a gained experience.  

The cycle begins with the projection of the video “Air Cushioned Ride” (2006), which documents an encounter that Anri Sala experienced while driving across Arizona, listening to baroque chamber music on his car radio. The transmission was perturbed as Sala pulled into a rest area, where a mass of parked trucks interfered with the signal. As he circled around the vehicles, an unknown station playing country music intermittently interrupted the baroque music. This kind of interference is called cross modulation or spurious emission.

Second in the cycle, “A Spurious Emission” (2007), elaborates on this happenstance event.  
Sala commissioned a composer to transpose it into a formal musical score, played alternatively by a baroque trio (cembalo, gamba, viola) and a country band (lead guitar, bass and drums). The film features the musicians and the ghostly silhouette of a drummer drawn over the image, as they perform the score. Although both soundtracks are similar, it is space that composes the sound of “Air Cushioned Ride” while in “A Spurious Emission” it is time that unfolds it. One has the reminiscence of space but with an additional time structure that conducts it.  

The printed version of the score includes drawings of the trucks at the moment when they interfere with the music.

“After Three Minutes” (2007) is a double video projection, which includes and re-presents “Three Minutes” (2004), a silent video where a cymbal, filmed under strobe lighting, becomes a dazzling visual rather than a sonic object. Conscious that, in this first version, standard video technology couldn’t capture the strobe’s 90 light emissions per second Sala re-filmed it projected at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, using a security camera that spliced its thrashed rhythm into only two stills per second. Now the cymbal stutters from dramatic flare to near darkness with a wholly different pulse to the earlier piece. “After Three Minutes” projects both videos alongside and in synchronicity with each other.

During this third time, in the opposite room, simultaneously with “After Three Minutes”, the lights go on and another work is exposed. « Title Suspended » (2008) is a sculpture evolving in time. In vis à vis two gloved hands are slowly rotating, completing a full cycle every two minutes. Each rotation is made of an ascending and descending phase, gaining and loosing shape, as a sense of perfection falters at the same time as the fingers collapse.  

The exhibition cycle repeats itself.

Aside, in a LP presented in the space where the score is, the visitor can listen to the improvisation of saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc responding to his own performance in the film Long Sorrow, during its projection in the gallery in 2006. All along this exhibition the public is invited to absorb what has been added, created and halted at each reinterpretation.

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