"Purchase Not by Moonlight"

Anri Sala hijacks the language of cinema and video to create disorienting dreamscapes that gnaw at the senses like acid eating through cheap cement. Featuring seven films dating from the late Nineties to the present, the impressive exhibition marks the Albanian artist's first major U.S. museum show. It also includes photographs and sculptures that explore a dialogue about the interplay of space and time. Many of the works mine the artist's interest in films that create their own soundtracks and addle the skull with a sense of disconnect.

In Mixed Behavior, a DJ appears on the roof of a building in Sala's native Tirana as fireworks pepper the sky and sheets of rain drench him on New Year's Eve. The artist blurs the line between the music and the pyrotechnics, hinting at the relationships between festive celebrations and acts of war. Sala's films are like jangled poetry in motion, at times both moving and banal yet hewing to the intriguingly ambiguous.
Feb. 12-March 1, 2009