Albanian artist Anri Sala, whose political films, photographs and installations have featured in the Venice Biennale and Manifesta, is a perfect candidate for an early-career monograph. This example from Phaidon’s Contemporary Artist series, with its edgy production and flat-plan puzzle of video stills, interviews, critical texts, artist writings, poetry and biographical information seems to be wearing a lot of hats. The conversation between Sala and Hans Ulrich Obrist is by turn insightful (it’s obvious that there is a real connection between the artist and curator) and rather mannered (with questions posed such as ‘… who is your oxygen?’).
Mark Godfrey’s extensive ‘Survey’ of Sala’s practice cuts carefully through the formal skin of time-based media to the thematic guts beneath, while Liam Gillick’s ‘Focus’, labours over the repetitive dynamic of the artist’s 2004 film ‘Now I See’, given his tenet on Sala’s ability to ‘float free of precise analysis’.
