For Anri Sala’s solo show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal we designed a bilingual exhibition catalogue. The catalogue consists of 2 books that are joined by the cover.
The first part is a rather classic catalogue with an essay and the front and end matter. The image part represents several walks through the exhibtion space as a continuos panorama of stills and pictures from the art works. The images are all set proportionally to their real size and run from one page to the other and over the folds.
The second part is the first publication to the project Inversion – Creating Space where there appears to be none by Edi Rama and Anri Sala. It shows corresponding drawings by Edi Rama and Anri Sala and interviews with Edi Rama by Michael Fried, Phillipe Parreno, Marcus Steinweg and Erion Veliaj.
Introduction by Anri Sala to Inversion:
Creating space where there appears to be none between the foreground and the background of a drawing, an in-between dimension: through the rabbit hole we freefall to unfold the compressed space underlying a doodle over the papers of a politician. Duty-freed from the dire reality of their pages, Edi Rama’s doodles take on a repetitive form like that of a “reality planner” whose bird’s eye vision of a landscape demarcates neighbourhoods as zones of thought through the cartography of colour. The lines curve and curl, never remaining straight for too great a distance, loosely binding the day-to-day. Over the past ten years, these automated abstractions have connected the present to the otherwise unintelligible future.
In order to perceive this space, we can put ourselves in an inane position, by looking at the foreground through the background, reversing our perception of the drawing. In its dynamic equilibrium, there is a slight imbalance, a tipping only legible to the mind, the aesthetics of which at first glance make such a leaning unnoticeable. There is a concealed urgency in the background indicating a ripeness of the underlying issues: a pragmatic offspring of democracy has emerged, namely the hollow call for stability, which has postponed core issues at hand. Democracy has been hijacked under the guise of “well-intended” bureaucracy. The vote is suspected of being fraudulent, but the means to correct it are equally fraudulent. Tied up in a vicious circle, the content of democracy is at the mercy of its syntax. This is why the background, veiled by the doodle, but also camouflaged on another level by the call for stability, sends out a now-signal, even more so than before. The only way that we can make this now-signal visible is by reversing the drawing. The aim is not to swap the background for the foreground permanently, but to approach the invisible middle ground from both sides, in order to become aware of the ambivalence in between.
This reversed perception of the drawing is possibly better explained by taking a landscape painting as an example. In the foreground, we have the action: a man killed by a snake, who is chanced upon by a frightened figure, who is witnessed in turn by a maid, who has dropped her laundry. In the background, we have the gradual semblance of stability: fishermen reining in their nets, bathers by the lakeside, and a citadel in the far distance. In the newly reversed painting, from the perspective of the perennial citadel, the dramatic instant of the man killed by a snake has been cloaked by the deceptive security of the new foreground. The flip-flopping of the illusory strata of the painting has made us lose touch with its main commotion.
Call the imagined inversion of the painting to a halt now, and let the fate of the man bitten by the snake return to the foreground. Translate this inversion into the doodle drawing. The political issues in the background move forward while doodle retreats into the background. The viewer no longer omits the once-political background.
After this exchange of the background with the foreground we are almost at the place of the author of the drawing, the artist. When he doodles, his gaze is absent-minded, perhaps a few steps behind his thoughts. His doodle’s background overlaps with his mind’s foreground. What do we see when we are put in the seat of automatic creation? In fact, doodling is the opposite of absent-mindedness—it is the embodiment of present-mindedness, one could say, though the word doesn’t exist. The atmospheric perspective, the in-between dimension mentioned in the beginning, is made visible.
The muted space between his mind’s foreground and the focus of his gaze is conveyed by a series of one-on-one conversations. From the differing perspectives of four positions—Michael Fried, Philippe Parreno, Marcus Steinweg, Erion Veliaj—each tête-à-tête becomes a relay, traversing the distance like the intermediary figures in the imagined painting of a landscape, who will in a matter of time bring to the citadel news of a man killed by a snake.
Anri Sala
