The exhibition is imagined as an intersection of echoes and transpositions where the works reconstruct themselves on other moments and spaces.
On the day of the opening, upon entering the gallery, the visitors will insert their personal invitations into a barrel organ player. In the form of a punch card, each invitation will trigger the playing of four distinct seconds of a well-known punk song. Randomly inserted into the organ, the invitations collectively produce a deconstructed offspring of the punk song.
Like a strange echo, where disruption and continuance play both the same tune, from inside the gallery’s main space, a familiar melody is heard. In the film Le Clash, from the interior of a bricked up building, a once influential rock and punk venue, comes the famous riff of a song. Slowly revolving the handle of a barrel organ, two musicians stroll past the abandoned concert hall. The sounds of the organ and their singing synchronise with the resonating riff, prompting a simultaneous stereo effect. A man wanders around the place with a shoebox under his arm. Listening absentmindedly, he slowly turns a small handle that sets off - note by note- a different version of the same song. Where the distinct melodies conjoin, a sense of shifting realty occurs, highlighting two differing recollections of the punk song.
Mounted on a window’ opposite the film projection, a music box - Previously camouflaged inside a shoebox seen in Le Clash - enables the visitor to “play” the gallery space like an instrument. “Playing” the window, adds an additional layer to the soundtrack of the film.
From an identical window at the Central Library of UNAM, allows the visitors to play the tune of the punk song to a different surrounding. In the distant background of the backyard of the gallery (on the windowsill of an adjoining building), shimmers an illuminated fan previously used in the performance of 5 Flutterbyes. Based on the aria Vogliatemi bene, un bene piccolino, from Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 5 Flutterbyes is a duet between five sopranos and two baritones. When one soprano sings, the other sopranos withheld their voices to only mime the act of singing. The instant the soprano suspends her voice another soprano takes over. Singing in thurns from different whereabouts, the five sopranos reveal a wandering presence of Madama Butterfly.
The muted space between the fore- and the background of a doodle is the starting of Inversion - Creating Space Where There Appears to Be None, a series of drawings that Sala made in collaboration with Edi Rama, the mayor of Tiranna and the leader of the Albanian opposition. One-on-one conversations between the art critic Michael Fried, the artist Philippe Parreno, the philosopher Marcus Steinweg, and the politician Erion Veliaj and Rama attempt to map the distance between the doodle and the underlying politcal issues in its background. From differing perspectives, each of the tete-a-tete reveals the tension between the mind’s foreground and the focus of the gaze in Rama’s absent-minded drawings.
The works in this exhibition transfer to diverse places and contexts: they emit calls out to their new surroundings and allow for the echoes of those calls to return from the various recipients, in order to locate, identify and unveil a muted physical or political space.
