In this piece, Catherine Fowler addresses one of the more neglected aspects of scholarship on moving image art, namely the role of sound. For Fowler, the Albanian filmmaker/artist Anri Sala’s work – which, with its perpetual reinvention of the sound-image relationship, invites uses the space of its sonic environment in order to make the spectator aware of the absences and gaps in the spatial architecture of the musem – is ideal for exploring the use of sound in moving image work exhibited in gallery environments.

Writing in 1989, Serge Daney diagnosed a reversal in the history of cinema: whereas cinema had developed via the projector as a history of the audience’s “immobilisation”, he observed that this had been replaced by the parade, as “we’ve become highly mobile in relation to images which have in turn become increasingly static.”1 In the thirty years since Daney’s observation we have seen the rise of the gallery as a screening environment in which visitors will regularly parade past images and objects and through environments. For Daney, casually passing by the parade of images rather than trapped in the movie theatre viewers can engage only on a superficial level, as if window shopping (as Anne Friedberg once put it2). However Daney’s assertion would seem to over-emphasise the visual aspects of the audio-visual experience of cinema. While acts of looking benefit from physical immobilisation, because sound travels acts of listening can often benefit from a more mobile demeanour. In this essay I will consider how contemporary artists working in the gallery with audio-visual material make use of the mobility of the visitor. My case study will be the work of Anri Sala.

While the last three decades of moving images in galleries has produced much stimulating new scholarship on the visual, perceptual, optical and physical aspects of artworks, sound has been a relatively under-explored area.3 On the one hand, for the first two decades this absence can be explained by the fact that sound was a challenge to both artists and institutions. Many artists were untrained in film and video or were using unsophisticated equipment, and many art spaces were ill-equipped to stop sound-bleed. On the other hand, the absence of concentrated work on sound can be seen to replicate a bias in screen studies, in which the audio is frequently neglected for the visual.

One further explanation for the neglected discussion of audio in artists’ moving image output could be the sheer variety of the work available. Examples in which music, soundtrack and sound effects have some significance include adapted music videos: Doug Aitken’s Autumn (1994) and the installations that follow which include soundtracks (such as Electric Earth 1999);  architectural and atmospheric soundscapes: a voice telling us to enter and shut the door behind us contributes to Swell (1995) by Jennifer Stenkampf; and soundtracks: Huyghe’s Auditorium (1998) comprises a cinema-screen shaped blue window and loudspeakers broadcasting sounds recorded in the exhibition, while Douglas Gordon films James Conlon conducting the soundtrack to Hitchock’s Vertigo (1958) in Feature Film (1999). Equally, several artists are known to have a particular interest in audio-visual relations. Christian Marclay, a practicing DJ, in Up and Out (1998) plays Blow up with the soundtrack from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, while in Video Quartet (2002) he has four channels, each one a montage of hundreds of musical scenes from classic Hollywood films. Meanwhile Janet Cardiff working with George Bures Miller is well known for sound practice including narrators who guide us around audio and video walks (An Inability to Make a Sound, 1992; The Telephone Call, 2001; Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, 2012).4

The brief descriptions above establish one aspect of the audio that can be emphasised by moving images in the gallery: the “suggestive weave between self and surrounding”5 and frequently it is sound – in the form of sound effects, music or dialogue – that choreographs our visit, moving us around a space. On a personal note then, if I think back to visiting Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium exhibition in 2002 (at the Haunch of Venison, London) then I can remember more than just the images. For instance, I recall how in order to reach the entrance to Viola’s exhibition I had to climb a set of rickety steps that smelt slightly musty, and negotiate the uneven shape of this former Public House in London. Because of the use of low light, it took time to orient oneself and ultimately it was the sounds rather than the images that provided guidance. Settling in front of one coloured plasma screen of an almost indiscernible sinking figure, all of a sudden the sound emitted by the slowed down rising actions of a figure on another screen somewhere else in the first room broke the silence. This sound seemed to come out of nowhere and, since I’d missed the visual cue that would have prepared me for it, assumed the strange status of a soundtrack for my visit.

According to Rhys Davies, also a visitor to Viola’s exhibition and a sound technician himself, what we hear in the Five Angels  exhibition is Viola’s “sound of being” which, Davies reveals, is a “subjective and expansive use of the sound archetype.”6 Even now, a decade and a half later, I remember the sound as being like a rush of air or “exhalation” a breathy underwater noise that disturbs the thin membrane of being that divides our body’s inside from its outside. Since this was a shared space, the exhalations also create new relations between self and other.

Thinking back to other exhibitions and installations my memory-images are accompanied by similar audio-visual impressions of the spaces in which I found them and the itineraries that were demanded of me, so it is the soundscapes that dominate my sensory memories. At the 2010 Sydney biennale Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves on Cockatoo Island (which is associated with settler narratives due to its history of housing convicts who had been sentenced to transportation) was installed in an expansive boat “shed” at the 2010 Sydney biennale and it had “texture”: crashing waves, electronic voice-over, haunting poetry, exquisite Chinese sound track. Sounds meet me even before I can see the images, threatening to sweep me away.

In contrast to Viola and Julien’s overwhelming spectacles, intimacy prevailed in Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition Eyeball Massage at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2011 which had “gurgling”: in the toilet cubicles. A miniature Pipilotti projected on the floor invaded our privacy with her pixie voice in Selfless in the Bath of Lava (1994). Also, Gillian Wearing’s video Confess all on video, don’t worry you’ll be in disguise at her monographic exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2013 had “whispers”: the voices of Wearing’s eleven confessors were only audible if one stepped inside the claustrophobic confessional booths in which small screens were enclosed. Once inside there was an alarming intimacy involved in the act of standing among strangers listening to further masked strangers confessing.

As we know, sound is always layered, woven, and intricately composed. Yet in the cinema – where, as Rick Altman puts it “the sound asks where? And the image responds here!”7 – sound most frequently plays second fiddle to the image. By contrast, in the gallery, where the space around the image becomes material and our bodies are freed from their seated stillness, the artist can carefully choreograph the dynamism of acoustic space. While Viola, Julien, Rist and Wearing have clearly taken advantage of the opportunities granted to the moving image once it is in art spaces, perhaps the strongest example of an engagement with acoustic space is in the work of Albanian artist Anri Sala. In his work sound in all its forms – as dialogue, speech, music, noise – has been explored diegetically, as a theme, and extra-diegetically, as a key part of the encounter that goes on between visitors and exhibition spaces. Sala helps us understand, then, the new audio-visual capacities that are opened up by the replacement of the projector with the parade.

Anri Sala I: Obscurity and Insufficiency in Intervista and LÀK-KAT

Since 1998 Sala, who trained at both art school and film school, has made nearly thirty videos, all installed in art galleries, some also shown in festivals. The longest are 26 minutes (Quelle histoire, 1999, and Intervista, 1998) and the shortest a mere 54 seconds (Window Drawing, 2006). A world traveller, Sala has said: “I believe that it’s very important to experience a radical rupture, discontinuity or transformation of meaning during your life.”[Anri Sala, “Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Anri Sala”, in Mark Godfrey, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Liam Gillick (eds.), Anri Sala (London: Phaidon, 2006), pp. 9-10.] For him, this came when he left his native Albania for France. His work is global in scope (among other places he has filmed in Paris, Senegal, Berlin, Milan, Iceland, Tirana, North Carolina and Mexico City) and it displays two dominant preoccupations, the first is the desire to test our perceptual capabilities by filming things as they hover between appearance and disappearance, while the second is to use sound, and especially acts of listening, to engender contact. As we will see from examples, both these preoccupations work with uncertainty, creating in their visitors an anxious feeling of not really knowing what to think.

Sala’s first film, Intervista (1998) was made to be projected on a big screen in the cinema ­– in the manner of propaganda films, as he put it.8 Despite its immobilised screening context, Intervista establishes the distinctive attitude to the audio-visual that would find its way into the gallery, which is to never prioritise one over the other but instead to show both as able to touch us, challenge and fail us at any time. The film opens with Sala’s return home after some time in France. He finds an old reel of film showing a 1977 congress of Albanian communist youth, which includes his mother being interviewed by a journalist; however the soundtrack is missing. The film follows his attempts to reconstruct his mother’s words, which she herself cannot remember. When he finally manages to do so, thanks to the services of a school of the deaf lip-readers, his mother is angry and surprised at the bland scripted words that, she says, were not her own.

Anri Sala's Acoustic Territories

Anri Sala

Intervista follows the attempts to reconstruct Anri Sala’s mother’s words from an old reel of film in 1977. Intervista (Finding the Words) (Anri Sala, 1998, 26min, single-channel video and stereo sound). Courtesy: Ideal Audience International, Paris; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. (c) Anri Sala.

Sala addresses similar concerns with LÀK-KAT shot in 2004 in Senegal. It features a lesson, filmed in semi-darkness, in which three boys repeat the words of their teacher spoken in Wolof, one of the local languages. It is important to know that all the words the boys repeat have to do with darkness and light, blackness and whiteness, and also that the starting point for Sala came when he learnt that many of the Wolof words for colours had been lost from the language, exchanged in everyday use for French terms.

These first two examples establish the intricacies of Sala’s artistic practice when it comes to sound. Sound can never be reduced to just one aspect, hence we cannot take voices, communication, knowledge, understanding or identity for granted since, through the soundtrack, these films also give us the opposite: dumbness, blockage, forgetting, mis-understanding, difference.

Investigating history and memory in Intervista Sala’s quest, to play for his mother the words that fit her speech, is riddled with gaps and dead ends. Jacques Rancière has observed that in Sala’s work “something is always lacking”.9 This lack is manifest in both films; in the silent film of his mother’s dumb speech, the translation by the school of the deaf who can never hear her words but know how to read her lips, and the fact that, as Rancière puts it: “the words themselves are deaf-mute, words of official ideology that preceded the movement of every mouth and the attention of every ear and ‘say-nothing’.”10

With LÀK-KAT, once again, we have a scenario in which time and history have eroded the connection between speech and identity, as the teacher teaches young boys words forgotten in their time that “conjure the oppressions of colonial rule and the resistance to it.”11 But we are unsure how much the boys understand the words themselves, since their quick repetition makes nonsense or, as they say at the end of the film, LÀK-KAT/gibberish out of them. Equally, the image-track is so dark that the faces of the boys and their teacher are hard to discern. In the case of both films, then, we are offered close-ups on faces that mask rather than clarify the people themselves. In Intervista the video’s close up on Sala’s mother’s face, which lacks a voice, reinforces the impossibility of ever understanding the past moment through the present. Similarly, in LÀK-KAT shots of the boys and their teacher are presented as abstract shapes that add little to the voices that we hear.

In Sala’s early practice, sound, in the form of speech and voice, is unsynched from persons and mouths. Sala’s strategy goes against documentary’s “convention of nailing voices to bodies” as Pooja Rangan points out this convention “hold[s] up a fantasmatic image of voice-body unity that reassures the listener of their place in the ontological order of things.”12 Not only are bodies deprived of voices and vice versa, the words spoken by Sala’s mother and those copied by the two boys belong to contested histories and have an ambivalent relationship to memories – personal and cultural. Both the mystery of Sala’s mother’s dialogue and the intrigue of the Wolof phrases challenge selfhood. Sala’s mother is perplexed by a past that she mis-remembers, while the boys are presented with a past that has no meaning for them: it can be learnt but not understood. Another way of putting this is to say that in Sala’s work sound has no straightforward source. His interest in sound echoes Brandon Labelle’s feeling that:

the seemingly innocent trajectory of sound as it moves from its source and toward a listener, without forgetting all the surfaces, bodies, and other sounds it brushes against, is a story imparting a great deal of information fully charged with geographic, social, psychological and emotional energy.13

Sala’s achievement in this early work is to find audio-visual combinations that express the complicated trajectories travelled by dialogue, public speech and barely-still-existing languages. In the case of both films the lack of a listener or listeners has led to the acts of forgetting with which they are concerned. When there is a disconnect between the source for sound (Sala’s mother, the original speakers of Wolof) then it follows that it fails to “brush against” these other elements. In these cases sound does not travel. For Sala’s mother, changes in systems have made reconstruction almost impossible, or as Sala himself puts it: “What happens when a system changes, especially in the case of totalitarian regimes which exercise great control over language, is that the syntax of the language breaks.”14

Anri Sala

White text against a dark background becomes pattern and light, bodies become instruments. LÀK-KAT 2.0 (Anri Sala, 2015, 9min38s). Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery. (c) Anri Sala.

In LÀK-KAT, visual, audio and textual elements conspire to make us painfully aware of the insufficiency of each. The images – a series of long shots – are barely lit and we strain our eyes to see the boys’ faces. Close-ups are intercut with occasional shots of a fluorescent tube which attracts moths. The teacher says a word, a translation appears on screen and the boys repeat the word. The impact of these different elements creates an experience that is both empty and overwhelming. Voice becomes music, white text against a dark background becomes pattern and light, bodies become instruments. Once again we could say that language breaks, yet we can go further with LÀK-KAT due to its more experimental nature and say that the language of the moving image also breaks.

Anri Sala II: Soundspace

The year 2004 provides a bridge between Sala’s move from projector to parade, conceptualising a visitor who is on the move and therefore open to audio-visual choreography. In this year Sala had the opportunity to create two monographic exhibitions, one in the Couvent de Cordeliers at the Musée d’art Moderne de la ville de Paris, and another at the Centre for Contemporary Art, located in the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.15 The combination of work that a solo exhibition allows meant that Sala could think in more depth about how to express the breakage of the moving image across work. It should be of no surprise that he used sound-bleed strategically in both exhibitions, to punctuate viewings: if you follow the sound then things happen. The effect is rather like that described in Viola’s Five Angels exhibition, whereby visitors who have stopped to watch one video have their attention broken by sound from another behind or to the side, creating a kind of joined up experience and a soundscape for their visit.

Sala’s two exhibitions expanded the effects of individual works into a joined up soundscape; but that is not all that they did. Sala also designed the spaces to create uncertainty in his visitors. In Paris he planned the lighting such that a computer-controlled state of “half-light” was maintained in the gallery, with the projected image darkening rather than lightening the space.16 I have already discussed the darkness of the image in LÀK-KAT; several other videos shown in the Paris show were also dimly lit, hence when encountered in an indistinct space a twilight state reigned and everything seemed to slow down.17 In Warsaw Sala inserted slopes into the spaces “to trigger other senses like weight, gravity or vertigo” that you became aware of physically although you couldn’t see the slopes.18 Both of these interventions on Sala’s part target bodies on the move: half-light and the ground falling away from us  are only alarming if we are trying to find our way. Such strategies make it clear that the artist had started thinking about moving the visitor around the space.

As we will see, Sala’s concentration upon the space beyond the frame has led to an increasing sophistication in his conceptualisation of the extra-diegetic audio-visual aspects of the spaces in which his exhibitions happen. In 2008 he created a sculptural installation called Doldrums which has featured in many solo exhibitions since. Doldrums consists of snaredrums which are scattered through the exhibitions whose drumsticks spring to life when they are activated by the low frequencies of other soundtracks in the exhibition. Hence from 2004 sound becomes soundspace as Sala begins to design the spaces for our encounter and think about how different art works can respond to the physical and acoustic qualities of the artspace. Most recently the acoustic qualities of his exhibition spaces have played a role in the production of the audio-visual elements.

Doldrums consists of snaredrums scattered through the exhibition, whose drumsticks spring to life when they are activated by the low frequencies of other soundtracks in the exhibition. Exhibited here in Bridges in the Doldrums (Anri Sala, 2016) in the Instituto Moreira Salles. Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Vicente de Mello.

Anri Sala III: Reverberating Relations

While Sala’s early work is interested in language and voice, since 2003 he has incorporated more and more music into his artworks. In the first instance we find sonic protagonists – musicians and DJs – and the making of sound and music dominating Sala’s screens. For example in Mixed Behaviour (2003) a DJ on a rainy Tirana rooftop plays beats, while a firework show explodes over his head, in Long Sorrow (2005) a saxophonist plays free jazz while standing on a platform high up on a Berlin building. Later the playing of music dominates: in Answer Me (2008) a young man drums vigorously inside a geodesic dome in East Germany, while a woman behind him attempts to get him to respond to her and in Le Clash (2010) the eponymous band’s hit “Should I Stay or Should I Go” is reinterpreted on a barrel organ and a music box. Each of these music-led videos appear to be leading up to Sala’s recent engagement with acoustic space, with which I will close this essay.

In an earlier essay on Sala in 2013 I described his visuals as producing “image-echoes”—images whose “indeterminate depictions” (to use Jacques Ranciere’s phrase19) mean that they keep coming back to us and keep us coming back to them.20 Taking Sala’s work since 2013 into consideration, the visual strategy of the echo is extended through aural strategies of ‘reverberation’ – re-echoed sounds. We can see how reverberation connects the problematisation of the source from Sala’s early work to his increasing interest in the art space itself as an acoustic territory when we consider that one definition for the word is: “the persistence of a sound after its source has stopped, caused by multiple reflections of the sound within a closed space.”21

Sala explores reverberation in exhibitions at the Pompidou in Paris (2012) the German Pavilion in Venice for the Biennale (2013) and Haus der Kunst in Munich (2015). For Ravel Ravel Unravel, Sala’s exhibition as artist for France in the German pavilion, he used the space for what it could give to the work physically and acoustically. The title of the piece is a subtle play on words based on the verb “to ravel”, as well as its opposite, “to unravel”, as well as a reference to the famous French composer Maurice Ravel, who in 1930 composed the Concerto in D for the Left Hand which is at the heart of Anri Sala’s project. The notion of the “insufficiency” of sound was central to his practice once more, as across three rooms we are privy to fragments of a performance of music as it passes through the hands of several people and is mixed, un-mixed and re-mixed.

Anri Sala

The first room of Ravel Ravel Unravel (Anri Sala, 2013, French Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia). Photo: (c) Marc Domage.

In the first room for Ravel Ravel Unravel we encounter a silent close up of a woman wearing headphones, who seems intent upon something that we cannot see. There is a reminder of Intervista’s gaps and dead ends here, as she seems to be listening intently to something, but we cannot hear what it is.

The second room, Ravel Ravel Unravel. Photo: (c) Marc Domage.

The second room is a semi-anechoic chamber designed to annihilate the sense of space (by suppressing echoes). In this room, two screens, one slightly below and to the side of the first, show us different pianists playing Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand for piano and orchestra. The performances shift in and out of sync. The effect of this arrangement of screens and spaces is complex to describe to anyone who has not experienced it because it is physical and sensual as well as intellectual. Intellectually Sala seems to be contrasting the suppression of an echo in the space with the musical race that is going on between the two pianists in the films. The uncertainty created by the low lighting and slopes recurs in the form of the anechoic chamber, as a kind of acoustic disorientation. In the third and final room on a smaller screen we see footage of the woman from the first room mixing the two performances from the second room.

Anri Sala

The third room, Ravel Ravel Unravel. Photo: (c) Marc Domage.

Once again, we see concerns from Sala’s early work surfacing in this later work. The temporal gap between the two pianists’ performances is like the gap between his mother’s past (caught on camera but forgotten by her) and present, in each of which her words have very different reverberations. Or the gap between what the words the boys repeat once meant and what they signify now. In all cases the sound “persists” yet it is painfully insufficient since the connection to its source is lost. What Ravel Ravel Unravel adds to the earlier work is the spatialisation of these gaps and losses such that the visitor is put in the position of the mother and young boys, and we experience reverberations as we cross the three spaces. Inevitably, we sense this artwork differently than we would if it was in a movie theatre. We sense it as louder or quieter, as happening before, after or during our passage across the three rooms, and as reverberating differently according to how we move through the space.

Sala’s multi-channel sound and video installation The Present Moment (in D) at the Haus der Kunst builds upon his work in the German pavilion by repeating some of its elements, but doing so in the same space. The mobility of the visitor is heightened in this work, which relies upon the visitor making their way across the space in order to function. According to Sala “The Present Moment (in D) is a fictional rearrangement of a piece of chamber music, as if it were set and experienced in a space ending in an imaginary cul-de-sac.”22 A recording of Schoenberg’s renowned 1899 composition, Verklärte Nacht (Op.4), performed by a sextet of two violins, two violas, and two cellos, marks its starting point. The recording is heard at the entrance to the space. As the visitor crosses the space so the original composition wanders across the space with him/her.

Anri Sala

Installation view of The Present Moment (in D) (Anri Sala, 2014), as part of Der Öffentlichkeit – Von den Freunden Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photo: (c) Jens Weber.

The installation takes its form from the structural composition of Schoenberg’s 12-tonal scales. Whereas in Schoenberg’s construction, where all tones were supposed to be played in an equal succession to trigger the next progression of tones, within Sala’s installation, these recorded tones are isolated from the composition and performed separately in different ways at the opening and ending parts of the space. As Sala puts it, these tones: “drift across the space, as if expelled from the main body of the music.”23 At the far end of the exhibition there is a third movement in which all the D tones of the composition are played repeatedly until they are replaced by the next new tone that has crossed the space. Hence the musicians were required to stay with one action and completely disregard the ergonomic changes from the original piece of music.

Anri Sala

This image shows the separation of the recorded tones across the space in The Present Moment (in D) (2014). Photo: (c) Jens Weber.

Once the playing of the D tones ends, a video at the far end of the exhibition begins, showing us the sextet whose performance we have been listening to, but even in this video there is no sense of an explanation or source.  It is never the intention of the images to show us how the sound is made. The sextet is filmed from the side so they do not face the camera and the instruments themselves, as well as the points of contact that create the music, remain unseen. Instead, what we do see are elbows, faces and the exertion of these parts that takes place an instant before the sound happens. As with the moments analysed from Intervista and LÀK-KAT, Sala has filmed the performance using tight close-ups of body parts, in The Present Moment (in D) this has the effect of emphasising contortion and labour.

The installation revolves around the question of the immediate present, in an art form bound to concepts of temporality and transience. What does it mean to consider the “now” in music? Does sound allow the present to be experienced? Can a composition’s temporality be reduced to the “here and now” of its presence? How can such questions be made tangible to an audience? These questions are posed both in the process of making the work and in the moment that we encounter it.

The Present Moment (in D) deserves a far longer discussion than I have time for here, therefore I will merely touch upon two elements. First, Sala’s categorizing of his exhibition as a “fictional rearrangement of a piece of chamber music.” Sala’s fictional rearrangement appears to continue what he started in Intervista and LÀK-KAT – the idea that sound can also deceive, that it will not necessarily locate, identify, represent; it may instead dislocate, split and misrepresent. Sound is therefore given autonomy from the image and a relationality that it rarely possesses in the cinema.

Second, the decision to film the musicians in oblique ways is reminiscent of the close up unsynching of mouth and voice in Intervista and the obscuring of faces in LÀK-KAT. I suggested that in these cases sound does the work of the image. By contrast, in The Present Moment (in D), the images deny us the origin of the sounds and we attend instead to the physical effort that precedes the sounding of the ensuing notes. Returning to Altman, it is as if, in this installation when sound asks “where”, the image asks where as well, thereby displacing the task of connecting sound and image onto each visitor who will, necessarily, each have a different experience of the “where” of the audio-visual as they wander or parade across the space.

Finally then, and in conclusion, in Anri Sala’s art the once immobilised audience are invited to move across art spaces, while the auditory insufficiency that has for so long challenged attempts to give equal attention to sound and image in cinema becomes the excuse for the artwork. Hence Sala’s videos and installations, which are interested in places and displacements, use art galleries to make us aware of absences, gaps and empty spaces. They do so by moving us around and moving sound around us. It is through these strategies that they create acoustic territories that are filled with the insufficient, disappearing sounds of history, memory and identity.

This article has been peer-reviewed.

Endnotes:

  1. Serge Daney, “From Projector to Parade”, Film Comment 38:4 (July-August 2002): 36-39.
  2. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
  3. On moving image in galleries since 1990 see: Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen, (Bristol: Intellect, 2009); Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). Catherine Elwes Installation and the Moving Image (London: Wallflower Press, 2015) has a short chapter on sound. For a sustained engagement with sound in art spaces in the 1960s and 1970s see Holly Rogers, Sounding the GalleryVideo and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
  4. For a full list of Cardiff and Bures Miller’s video walks see http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html
  5. Brandon Labelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Continuum, 2010), p. xxi.
  6. Otto Neumaier, “Space Time Video Viola”, in Chris Townsend (ed.), The Art of Bill Viola (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), pp. 157-158.
  7. Rick Altman, cited in Steven Connor, “The Modern Auditory I”, in Roy Porter, (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, (London/New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 213.
  8. Anri Sala Interview with the author, Berlin, 2016.
  9. Jacques Rancière, “La politique du crabe/The Political Agenda of the Crab”, in Anri Sala – Entre chien et loup (Paris/Cologne: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004), p. 76.
  10. Ibid., p. 75.
  11. Mark Godfrey, “Articulate Enigma: The Works of Anri Sala”, in Godfrey et al. (eds.), Anri Sala, op. cit., p. 66.
  12. Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction”, in Discourse 39:3 (Fall 2017): 284.
  13. Labelle, Acoustic Territory, op. cit., p. xxv.
  14. Lynne Cooke and Anri Sala “From Silence to Language and Back Again”, Parkett 73 (2005): 74.
  15. The Paris exhibition was called Entre chien et loup (Between dog and wolf), this is a French phrase that refers to twilight as an in-between time in which night might transform at any moment from one element into its dangerous other. The second was simply entitled Anri Sala.
  16. See Suzanne Pagé preface to Anri Sala: Entre chien et loup”, p. 9.
  17. Examples included Time after Time and Ghostgames (2002) both of which take place at night.
  18. Anri Sala, “Interview: Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Anri Sala”, in Godfrey, et al. (eds.), Anri Sala, op. cit., p. 17.
  19. Rancière, “La politique du crabe”, op. cit., p. 77.
  20. Catherine Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness: Potentiality in the Moving Image”, Art Journal 72:1 (2013): 74.
  21. See dictionary.reference.com
  22. http://issuu.com/haus_der_kunst/docs/hdk-anri-sala-katalog_en
  23. http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/2296/anri-sala-the-present-moment-in-b-flat/view/

About The Author

Catherine Fowler is Professor in Film and Media at Otago University. Her work on artists’ moving images has been published in Cinema Journal, Screen, MirAJ and Art Journal. She is also the author of the BFI Classic on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2022).

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