Tirana Zoo featured in “Arena” video

TIRANA, Feb. 8 – “Arena”, a solo exhibition by Albanian-born Paris-based artist Anri Sala is the newest event in the Promenade Gallery of the southern coastal city Vlora.
Brought by Gallery On The Move, “Arena” consists in the presentation of the video under the same title which Anri Sala created in 2001 at the Tirana Zoo area. In “Arena” Sala comprises only location shots of a site whose function cannot clearly be identified. Long corridors with glass walls open on to a lawn upon which stray dogs rest lethargically. Repeated faint animal noises of an exotic nature are audible. Time runs empty in this place outside the social world. This is the first project of Gallery On The Move exhibitions program at The Promenade Gallery in Vlora.The exhibition will be open to the public from Feb. 10 to Feb. 25.
Anri Sala has recently been selected to represent France at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, reports Le Quotidien de l’art. Sala previously won the Young Artist Prize at the 49th Biennale in 2001 with his film “Uomoduomo”.
Sala has attached a growing importance to sound, creating remarkable works in which he recasts sound’s relationship to the image. Linked to this development is Sala’s long-standing interest in performance, and particularly musical performance.
Born in Tirana in 1974, Sala first studied arts at the Albanian Academy of Art before continuing her studies at the ʣole Nationale des Arts D꤯ratifs in Paris in 1996, and finally moved to Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing until 2000. He is a leading contemporary artist whose early videos and films mined his personal experience to reflect on the social and political change taking place in his native Albania.