Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce Anri Sala’s exhibition “Purchase Not by Moonlight”, which will open on Wednesday, May 6th and run until June 20th. The exhibition will focus on “Purchase Not by Moonlight”, 2008, a single work consisting of four distinct films, Answer Me, After Thre... Read more
Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce Anri Sala’s exhibition “Purchase Not by Moonlight”, which will open on Wednesday, May 6th and run until June 20th. The exhibition will focus on “Purchase Not by Moonlight”, 2008, a single work consisting of four distinct films, Answer Me, After Three Minutes, Time After Time, and Làk-kat, as well as a kinetic sculpture entitled Title Suspended and Doldrums, a series of snare drums. The work was first seen in Sala’s recent solo show at MoCA North Miami, curated by Raphaela Platow, the second chapter of which will open at Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati on May 30 and run through September 6.
In the gallery’s entrance area, “Why the Lion Roars”, 2008 will also be on view, a set of 4 digital prints of fictional weather-related film programs associated with Sala’s permanent cinema project at Le 104 in Paris.
“Purchase Not by Moonlight” is perhaps the culmination of the artist’s investigation into the traditional format of a video exhibition, exploring the interplay of the various works that comprise it. Here the exhibition actually becomes a work in its own right. “A number of my recent works have this special quality to connect to each other. I’m trying to compose an inter-relationship that extends those works towards each other by implicating one into the other. Thus anticipating a reaction of togetherness in sense and space at the point that the show becomes inherent to each work.” From very early on, Sala has rejected the format of the walled-in black box in favor of a more fluid and open score in which various video works are shown in one space and are allowed to interact. In “Purchase Not by Moonlight” the experience of the exhibition is fully choreographed and unfolds in time with works running on a timer, as viewers are led from one work to the next, becoming more aware of their own bodies inhabiting the space. As the artist says:
“The issue is how to translate the ‘now’ and ‘then’ to the ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the exhibiting space. In a traditional theater, the environment and the film are not put in conversation, neither are different films put in a relationship with one another. There is only one present – the present of the film – and the theater space is annulled. Whereas in an exhibition, as the visitor enters the space, there is a shifting between his/her present and the present of the film. For Purchase Not By Moonlight, I’m thinking of an exhibition where the present is choreographed. The films turn on and off, inducing a present that leads the audience through the exhibition space itself.”
Sala creates an environment in which the visitor’s focus is directed toward specific works that engage in dialogue with each other, with the space, and the experience of the viewer. Many of the works presented explore the idea of echo. The boundary between the films and the viewer’s spatial reality is rendered porous by Doldrums, 2008 free-standing drums that play, as if by magic, to the sound of a particular film. Sound is made visual, turning into an almost material echo of the cinematic space.
