ANRI SALA
Born in 1974
Since the 1990s, Anri Sala has worked with a range of media including video, photography, installation, and more recently drawings and sculptures. His work explores the boundaries between image and sound in order to generate carefully assembled time-based moments which overlap one another. Through a new form of language, his work opens to multiple perspectives and interpretations, bringing together the past, present and future. Giving prominence to light, sound and space design, Sala’s work is often presented in immersive spaces, thus stimulating our senses and creating a link between the body and the architecture. The video Dammi i Colori (2003) represents the changes the Albanian capital underwent following a program of urban renewal that involved the repainting in vivid colors of the city’s buildings. The voice of the then Mayor of Tirana Edi Rama—promoter of the project as well as an artist himself—describes this regeneration process, based on the ideas of hope and utopia. The video is a portrait of a changing city, full of contrasts, caught between night and day, with the sounds of everyday life on its streets. Interpreting the contrasts of reality from an intimate and daily perspective, the video has a profound political value. It offers a suspended observation of a changing and porous landscape and a deflagrated social fabric, but driven by the desire to rebuild itself.