January 18–May 4, 2008

 

A N R I   S A L A   b. Tirana, Albania, 1974

Anri Sala's video Intervista (1998) begins like a detective story. Several years after the end of communism in Albania, Sala, who has been studying art in Paris, returns to Tirana to visit his parents. In their home, he finds an unprocessed 16mm film reel in plastic wrapping. The film dates to the communist era but neither of his parents can recall its content or the circumstances of its making. With no access to a film projector, Sala examines the negative by hand and discovers images of his mother at about the age of thirty. His curiosity piqued, he takes the film back to Paris and proceeds to restore it. To his surprise, he discovers footage of his mother meeting Enver Hoxa, Albania's communist leader. However, the audio track is missing. Will this fortuitous discovery unlock the secret of Albania’s communist past for the artist? Determined to reconnect the visual archive to its proper temporal context, Sala employs lip readers from an Albanian school for the deaf to decipher his mother's speech and therefore provide the film with a more complete narrative, and implicitly its testimony. The reconstituted footage is then supplemented with videotaped conversations between Sala and his mother. This recursive interaction stages Intervista as an archive existing alongside a running commentary on its status as a historical object, a shifting of temporal and historical scales between the communist past and the politically ambiguous present, between self and other, artist and mother, filmic image and its historical meaning; between conditions of archival production and historical reception, between muteness and language, between image and memory.

 

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