Anri Sala: If And Only If
July 18, 2018, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
July 16 – August 2, 2018

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to announce the intervention “If And Only If” by Anri Sala, at the Boxing Club, part of Summer School as School 2018 Public Program.

Sala’s new film, If and Only If (2018), based on Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola, charts the course of a journey, which becomes an integral part of its musical composition. A snail gradually travels the full length of a viola bow, innocuously moving across it, but minutely disrupting the exquisite balance on which the maestro’s playing instinctively relies. This traversal emulates a concealed dialogue between two voices that is subtly implied at the heart of the composition. The work is performed as a monologue, but it is in an allusion to dialogue, in the form of the sound of two strings, that Sala renders Stravinsky’s Elegy as a tactile interaction between the renowned violist Gérard Caussé and a garden snail. The snail, its location and pace imposing itself on the performance, causes the viola player to simultaneously make adjustments for and thus compose with this evolving situation. The standard duration of Elegy is thus subverted through the interaction between the musician and the snail, revised to almost double its usual time. When the snail slows down, hesitating to move forward, Caussé adapts the Elegy to encourage the snail to carry on. The music becomes an organic composition and a mutual effort, created by the performance of the violist and action of the snail, resulting in a soundtrack to the snail’s ‘epic voyage.’

The Boxing Club since September 2014 is administered by Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina and the coalition with the same name, constituted by independent art and culture institutions, independent media organizations and society organizations. The building was made accessible for the public by Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art through a site-specific work by Elana Katz, curated by Albert Heta.
The building held multiple identities through time. The building, once used also by Boxing Club Prishtina, today is an independent contemporary art platform located in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo. Since 2015, the Boxing Club is the main venue for the Public Program of Summer School as School.

Berlin-based artist Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania. Recent solo exhibitions include 'The Present Moment (in D)', Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2014); 'Anri Sala: Two Films', Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit MI (2012); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2012); '1395 Days Without Red', Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2012); National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2011); Serpentine Gallery, London, England (2011) and Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, Quebec (2011).

Sala was awarded the Prix Gilles Dusein in 2000; the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and the Absolut Art Award, Stockholm, Sweden in 2011. In 2013, he was selected to represent France at the 55th Venice Biennial with 'Ravel Ravel Unravel' and, most recently, Sala was the recipient of the Vincent Award, Den Haag, The Netherlands (2014).