Anri Sala: Ghostgames
"In my work, I am interested in approaching those dark regions where culture and nature meet, where rules encounter spontaneity, the rational encounters the irrational, and the desire for control encounters the desire for loss of control or for the unintended." ANRI SALA
Anri Sala, born in Tirana, Albania, in 1974, left his homeland in 1996 and moved to Paris. Today he lives and works in Berlin. The work on display, Ghostgames, is one of Anri Sala's few video works in which a sequence of images with a plot-like structure is shown. Otherwise, his film works tend to feature static shots that focus on a single image, such as ‘Intervista’ from 1998, in which his mother talks about her political past, or ‘Time after Time’ in which the camera is focused on a horse standing motionless at the side of a road at night while traffic rushes past. In his earlier videos, Sala takes an almost historical-documentary position, dealing with the political and social situation in his homeland, but also elsewhere. In Ghostgames, we see a play of light and darkness, crabs wandering around on a beach at night, people caught between fascination and repulsion, who draw us in. The ghostly movement of the so-called ghost crabs and the flickering light of torches create an eerie dynamic and an immediate tension. The camera remains in close-up, and there is no information about the location and surroundings of the action. Only gradually does one discover that this is a game in which the aim is to chase a crab between the legs of one's opponent.
