Anri Sala

In late September, the landscape imagined by Philippe Parreno for the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce will disappear, making way for the autumn and winter months, for an immersive, cosmic, and nocturnal work by artist Anri Sala.

Time No Longer (2021), a video projected onto vast, curved screens—perfectly marrying the Rotunda’s cylindrical forms—is a recent work by the artist and this is its French premiere.

Anri Sala’s work will also invest the display cases in the passageway around the Rotunda and in the Gallery 2 space on the ground floor of the museum, as well as in the basement, with iconic pieces by the artist taken from the Collection, including Take Over (2017) and 1395 Days Without Red (2011).

Time No Longer draws its inspiration from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time for part of its dramaturgy. Yet, here Sala orchestrates a new space-time: the soundtrack, arranged for clarinet and saxophone based on the solo The Abyss of the Birds, becomes a music for contemporary times. After its presentation in Houston, and then at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Time No Longer inscribes the convolutions of its infinite choreography into the circular space of the Rotunda, which seems, in turn, to be freed from earthly gravity, and engaged in perpetual movement.

The dance of time and its ghosts, its embodiments and erasures are the themes that permeate the hanging entitled Une seconde d’éternité (A Second of Eternity), whose carte blanche to Anri Sala, forms a spectacular epilogue.