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Albanian artist Anri Sala's oeuvre is characterized by the relationship between individual and collective history. By presenting four video works created between 1997 and 2000 in the Filmbox, Sammlung Goetz provides insights into his cinematic vision.
Anri Sala succeeds in expressing socio-political issues and questions with moving images. He often links the present and past to each other in a poetic manner. Déjeuner avec Marubi (1997) was created one year after he had left Tirana to begin his studies in Paris at the Département Vidéo der École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In the one-channel video-animation, he combines the historical photograph Women in Skodra dress by Pjeter Marubi with an image from Édouard Manet's painting Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The work Nocturnes (1999) takes place between the realms of fiction and documentation: the memories of a former UN soldier and observations of an ornamental fish breeder are contrasted with each other. Byrek (2000) is a video installation in which Sala projects a film about the preparation of the eponymous traditional Albanian dish onto an enlarged copy of a letter from his grandmother. Sala won the Young Artist Prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale for his film Uomoduomo (2000) which showed a man sleeping in the cathedral of Milan.
Uomoduomo, 2000 (1’ 41’’) | November 30 – December 21, 2001
Byrek, 2000 (21’ 43’’) | January 7 – February 1, 2002
Nocturnes, 1999 (11’ 28’’) | February 4 – March 1, 2002
Déjeuner avec Marubi, 1997 (4’ 07’’) | March 4 – 22, 2002
