NAU NUA: ŠEJLA KAMERIĆ & ANRI SALA

Double-deal

Šejla Kamerić i Anri Sala

1395 Days Without Red

Production stills from 1395 Days without Red, photo by Milomir Kovačevic Strašni
A project by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers'

2011

Imagine two people looking at the same mountain from two opposite points. Each one sees a different side of the mountain but the mountain. Each one could say that what they see is the mountain, but so is the side that they cannot see. That’s also something applicable to life itself and that can help us have a more open attitude to existence and all its manifestations.

Šejla Kameric and Anri Sala have created a project with two visions in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers in which the difference in points of view leads us to a broader understanding of the same event. The 1395 days without red project refers to the days of the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996, where the continued shootings between snipers became embedded in everyday life making any action that involved go out home a genuine act of survival. Šejla Kameric and Anri Sala made a film work together that resulted in two independent films, making it clear that the vision of each person, although the starting material is the same, has a decisive influence on any aspect of life, and also in the art world.

The artist from Sarajevo Šejla Kamerić presents her film following the character played by Spanish actress Maribel Verdú. The anguish of having to decide at every moment which way to go knowing the risk of being shot, such as street or intersection, alone or mixed with the crowd, while the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, which never ceased its activity, rehearse the play The Pathetique by Tchaikovsky, as it’s known his Symphony No. 6. Trials with its stops and returns to start on the same passage, are mixed with the anguish of the woman in the street not knowing what to do. It’s a work which refers to its author to her own frightening experience.

The film of the Albanian artist Anri Sala bears on the fact that the character of Maribel Verdú is also a member of the orchestra and goes to the rehearsal session. Problems with the tempo interrupt the rehearsal again and again as the musician stops at every intersection and value load holding her breath to go on and mentally rehearsing the piece at the same time, humming it. In the film the rehearsal of the orchestra and the instrumentalist evolution converge in their own performances of the piece. From the orchestra’ rehearsal to the woman’s mind.

The entire project is a necessary bioscopic experience, openness and hygienic, to which the viewer must assert his own vision as one more and unique at the same time in the puzzle of existence.

EXHIBITION click here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Stills from films 1395 days without red by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala