Date posted: January 30, 2005

Anri Sala. Artist in Focus IFFR

Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (until February 20, 2005)

Anri Sala is this year’s Artist in Focus at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. On this occasion it was announced that there would be an Anri Sala exhibition at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen. With only three works it wasn’t much of an exhibition, still there were two works on show that I’m glad to have seen.

“Time after Time” (2004) is a short video of only 4 or 5 minutes. Not much happens in those few minutes, but it leaves you with some pressing questions and the sense that something is about to happen. With video art it always depends when you enter the installation. At first I didn’t see much, some lights in the distance, probably of a flat, and the vague contours of what could be a horse. The camera goes in and out of focus. When a car drives by you are suddenly made aware that you’re looking at a road and that the contours do indeed belong to a horse standing on the road. How did it get there? What is it doing there? At one point there’s a lot of noise when two trucks drive by, their headlights lighting the horse. And that’s it. As simple as it sounds, it really is quite mesmerizing.

In “Lak-kat” (2004) we can make out two black children, their faces barely visible, because of the low light, their eyes glowing in the dark. We hear the voice of an adult saying “Waxal, waxal leer”, which according to the subtitles means something like “Say, say shimmer”. To which one of the children replies with “Reer”, which apparently means dinner. “Deedet leer” the adult voice repeats. “Reer” the child says, its eyes drifting from the adult, whom we cannot see, to the camera. “Waxal L” the adult voice says and then again “Leer”. "Reer". "Leer". "Reer". This goes on for some time in a rhythmic cadence until the teacher introduces another word. Every now and then the camera switches to a fluorescent tube, where moths gather, their wings folding and unfolding in the same quiet cadence.

In the Senegalese language Wolof the words for green, blue and yellow like various other words, have been replaced by French terms, or so we learn from the sign near the entrance to the installation. But Wolof still retains numerous indiginous words for the shades between black and white, which refer to different skin tones “xees”, “xees peec” and “weex tàll”, which mean so much as light-skinned, almost white and pure white, respectively. Then there’s “tubab” for whitey and “xerer” for pale-skinned.

Again it’s very low-tech piece and not much in terms of content. Yet somehow the sounds and images reinforce each other to create something very poetic and beautiful. Of course part of the mechanism by which it works is quite obvious, the opposition of little black children with the voice of a teacher, the darkness, the single fluorescent light, the exotic language, but that doesn't keep it from working.