“At the age of four, Anri Sala was taken to the Palace of Pioneers in Tirana, then capital of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, in order to begin the violin lessons he had asked his parents for. ‘So there was this man sitting in front of a piano,’ the artist recalls, ‘and he needed to check if I had an ear.’ In a small, darkened room, the instructor clapped out a series of rhythms for the boy to repeat, each one longer and more complex than the last, ‘and I got so worried that I would miss the next one,’ Sala says. But he didn’t falter. ‘Good,’ said the violin teacher finally, satisfied with the boy’s ability to recognize and repeat a rhythm. ‘You’re done.’
Sala went on to study violin for seven years and, though he no longer reads music, he acknowledges that the experience helped him develop ‘an idea about musical tempo, and how to speak with musicians’ – both of which have proved useful in his numerous projects involving music of various stripes, be it Tchaikovsky or The Clash. But there is something about this story of his initial encounter in the Palace of Pioneers, with its play of difference and repetition, that resounds especially clearly in Sala’s upcoming project for the French Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale this year.
‘The idea was that I wanted to make a work that is about repetition,’ Sala told me last month in a cafe across the square from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, ‘the same and its difference and how you produce difference in the same.’ ”
Read all about that project in my latest blog for Frieze’s Venice Preview, Anri Sala Unravels His Project for the French Pavilion