village voice > art > Anri Sala at Marian Goodman Gallery by Kim Levin

village voice > art > Anri Sala at Marian Goodman Gallery by Kim Levin

Sala's art slips between sound and image, voice and vision, the legible and the visible, the abstract and the social, belief and mistrust—eluding symbolism and interpretation. It's about looking and listening. As the artist told me on the phone last week, "The formal things are pretty important, not because I'm attached to any formalism but because they're things that bring image, not things that bring explanation. They're things that you fail to translate or explain by words. I'm interested in when language fails to respond to the needs we have. That's when the visual becomes important. Language already has a lot of power in the world, even more than sex."