I cannot exaggerate the foundational importance of Anri Sala work in my own interest for contemporary art in general and video in particular. It was therefore very easy to select this work when Appleton Box gave us the honor to inaugurate the Art Collections cycle with a work from our collection.

This passion started with an image. A video still from Long Sorrow (2005), a central work in Anri Sala production where a free jazz saxophonist improvises standing on the outside the top-floor window of a building in Berlin, that I found in the website of the Ellipse Foundation collection. This poetic image, of intense solitude and concentration, intrigued me deeply. Over the years, being able to experience 1^st hand works likes Time After Time (2003), Long Sorrow (2005), Answer me (2008), Le Clash (2010) or 1395 Days Without Red (2011) became a serious objective.

To attempt to explain the source of this fascination, I will borrow heavily from a most interesting conversation between the art critic Michael Fried and Anri Sala on the occasion of the artist show at Centre Pompidou in 2012 which I found by chance in YouTube. Both the critic and the artist refer to one of the work’s central characteristic as its “presentness”. A very relevant word coming from a critic that finished its acclaimed and highly controversial essay “Art and Objecthood” from 1967 stating that “Presentness is Grace” after clamming that, unlike in minimalist sculpture, in his preferred modernist painting and sculpture “at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest. […] It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it”.

I can find no better words to describe my fascination with the work of Anri Sala, even if applying them to a time-based medium might over-stretch the point. To this experience of presentness contributes the melancholy of the sound, the invocation of inwardness of the characters, the uneven tempo of rithmic instruments that are pervasive in is work, the continuous avoidance of narrative even though many works bring a memory of historical events.

The work presented here, It Will Happen Exactly Like That (2008) does not deviate from these premises. A man deeply concentrated in performing a mysterious task of marking lines in a forest, very early morning, to a tempo set by the field marking machine and a voice-over that describes seemingly unrelated events apparently in the future. Borrowing again from the referred conversation between artist and critic, gestures and sound help keep us away from falling into narrative and drive second by second intensity to sustain the work’s total interest at every moment, until it reveals its grounding on a historical moment of our common culture: the “hand of god” goal of Diego Maradona in the 1986 World Cup.

What should we think about this choice of topic, and this elevation of a moment in popular culture to the status of an event deserving of a divine prophecy? We could start by recognizing that Anri Sala is not alone in the almost mythical treatment of sports heroes. Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno “Zidade, a twenty first century portrait” (2006), a masterpiece of presentness itself, comes immediately to mind in its audacious elevation of video to the status of a Goya or Velázquez portrait. In his works, Anri Sala explores our historical memory in an intersection with a broad cultural context: Our joint European history and  Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (written for Wittgenstein’s brother Paul a pianist who lost his right hand during the First World War) in the exhibition Ravel Ravel Unravel (2013), the demise of Punk music culture in Le Clash (2010), the siege of Sarajevo and Tchaikovsky 6^th Symphony in 1395 Days Without Red (2011). Beyond their formal aesthetics (i.e presentness) it is maybe this ability to call for a reflection on the delusions and horrors but also on the dreams of our common memory that makes these works simultaneously so conceptually challenging and so universally appealing.

We hope you appreciate it as much as we do.

Armando Cabral (May, 2019)