BREGENZ.- The 2021 summer exhibition is dedicated to Anri Sala. Originally planned for 2020, the exhibition has been postponed for a year. It is taking place concurrently with the Bregenz Festival, which Kunsthaus Bregenz is collaborating with in staging the world premiere of the opera Wind by Alexander Moosbrugger in 2021, as well as hosting festival concerts.

Musical phenomena play a major role in Anri Sala’s work. His transformative, time-based works develop from a dense network of relations between sound, image, and architecture. A recurring medium in the exhibition is film. In contrast to conventional cinema, Sala does not employ a strict narrative or even actors, it is rather musical pieces that become the real protagonists in the works. The cinematic results from the musical and not, as is customary, vice versa, enabling visitors to immerse themselves in a both visual and acoustic experience of the space.

Kunsthaus Bregenz in its atmospheric presence and distinctive acoustics offers the perfect resonance body for Anri Sala’s art, which always incorporates the exhibition space. For the artist, it is not simply a case of reacting to a given space, but rather about creating the conditions for the various works to be able to relate to one another and the audience.

Recent and entirely new works are on view in the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz. A record player, floating freely in an abandoned space capsule, a subtle alternating between the architecture’s contours being sharp or blurred, a garden snail slowly moving along a viola bow, a vintage wallpaper-printing roller whose metal pattern is translated into spectral sounds. All of these are elements and imagery that Anri Sala is employing in engendering creative shifts and to probe existing interpretive relations.

Anri Sala (born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania) studied in Tirana, Paris, and Tourcoing. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Vincent Award (2014).

Solo exhibitions have included ones at Centro Botín, Santander (2019–2020), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2019), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017), New Museum, New York (2016), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2015), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2011).

Sala has participated in many group exhibitions and biennales such as 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017), as France’s representative at the 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010), the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007), and the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006). He has already been exhibited at Kunsthaus Bregenz in the group exhibition Remind... in 2003.

He is showing an installation within the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston, until December 2021. Anri Sala lives and works in Berlin.

“In my work it’s never about the music per se, but rather what music goes through: the traces and sediments, scars and remains that a question leaves on the body of music through its passing.” --Anri Sala