Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA

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Press Release, Anri Sala
Leading contemporary artist Anri Sala’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery is conceived as a cycle, or loop, structured around pairs of works that mirror each other throughout the Gallery’s spaces.
Many of the works presented use live performance as their starting point or lead to a performance. Sala will stage the performance 3-2-1, 2011, in which saxophonists Andre Vida and Caroline Kraabel respond live to the artist’s film Long Sorrow in a series of daily performances.
Answer Me, 2008, was filmed in the dome of an abandoned surveillance station designed by Buckminster Fuller. The dome’s distinctive echo, triggered in the film by a man playing the drums in the large, empty space, drowns all the dialogue spoken by the female character, with the exception of the words that give the film its title. The snare drum in Answer Me appears in the first room of the exhibition and is activated by the inaudible low frequencies of the film’s soundtrack.
Two films deconstruct and reconfigure a well-known punk song: in Le Clash, 2010, performers outside a derelict concert hall in Bordeaux play new renditions of Should I Stay or Should I Go through a barrel organ and a music box. In the new film, Tlatelolco Clash, 2011, figures among the ruins of the Tlatelolco site in Mexico City insert random fragments of a musical score into a barrel organ, creating a disjointed version of the same song. The barrel organ’s perforated score is carved on the walls of the Gallery, allowing the sounds of the park and the Gallery to merge.
Winner of the Young Artist Prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Sala (born 1974, Albania) has had solo exhibitions at Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, Canada (2011), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2008) and ARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2004), as well as showing work in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including the Venice Biennale (2003, 2001 and 1999), Yokohama Triennial (2001) and Manifesta 3, Ljubljana (2000).
Concurrent with the Serpentine Gallery exhibition, Artangel will present a film by Anri Sala. For further information visit artangel.org.uk.
Andre Vida (born 1974) is a Hungarian American saxophonist, composer and lyricist living in Berlin. Vida has been at the forefront of several major developments in experimental music, including his membership in Anthony Braxton’s original Ghost Trance Ensemble, as founding member of New York collective the CTIA, performances with The Tower Recordings and subsequent ‘freak folk’ groups, and his extensive collaborations with electronic music visionaries Jamie Lidell, Tim Exile and Kevin Blechdom.

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