LONG SORROW
Anri Sala, 2005, 13’
One of Sala’s most touching and mysterious works: one long, slow take reveals the interior of an apartment in a modernist building in Berlin that residents have nicknamed the “Long Complaint,” or “Sorrow.” Outside the window we can see a saxophone player who is improvising a wild rhapsody as he hangs 30 meters off the ground, suspended like a figurehead on the prow of a building that sums up the aspirations and failures of 20th-century modernist ideology. Like many other works by Sala, Long Sorrow weaves music and architecture into a sweeping, abstract vision of history, a syncopated requiem for the great illusions that inflamed the 20th century: modernity, utopia, equality, and exceptionalism.
Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania. He received his BA in Painting and Sculpture from the National Academy of Arts Tirana, studied Video at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and completed post-graduate studies in Film Directing at Le Fresnoy–Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing. The artist lives and works in Berlin. Sala has received the CODAWorx Public Art Award (2021), the Mario Merz Prize Nomination (2015), the Vincent Van Gogh Award (2014), the 10th Benesse Prize (2013), the Absolut Art Award (2011), and the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale (2001). He has taken part in many group exhibitions and biennials, including the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), the Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013), the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007), and the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006).