Wettbewerb Kurzfilm Stadt und Land
Regie:Anri Sala
15:24 min., Albanien 2003

"In the past few years, the young Albanian-born video and film artist Anri Sala has been racking up awards and exhibitions. He is a standout in the Tate Modern’s first exhibition devoted to film and video, "Time Zones," on view through Jan. 2, 2005, and, over the summer, had his first solo museum show in Germany, at the Hamburg Deichtorhallen. His work has been featured in the past two Venice Biennales, and he has a new video currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the video Dammi I Colori (Give me color) (2003), first shown last year at the Venice Biennale’s "Utopia Station," Sala’s camera pans along the streets of Tirana, contrasting the dusty, torn up roads with apartment buildings that have been painted in bright primary colors, a project of Tirana’s mayor, Edi Rama, a former artist. In a voiceover (subtitled in English), Rama explains how he thought painting the building facades would give some hope to Tirana’s citizens, who are still suffering the effects of the city’s turbulent conversion from Communism to democracy.



The shots of the buildings, Rama’s soothing voice, and the ambient street sounds would have provided an absorbing enough artwork, but, as though inspired by the vibrant hues of the buildings, Sala looks for other bursts of color in the otherwise drab city, from a child in an orange Halloween mask to a splatter of yellow paint on a curb. Sala, who lives and works in Paris, has said of his native city "Each time I’m trying to find and follow the oddity of the place." He flirts with documentary in Dammi I Colori, but the piece can’t be neatly pigeonholed into that genre – it’s a poetic meditation on Tirana, and on the utopian, if rather quixotic, vision of its mayor."

by Sarah Douglas