Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major is being reimagined for a new sound installation in the Observatory Hill Rotunda.

Kaldor Public Art Projects has announced that for its next project Albanian-born French artist Anri Sala will create a new sound and sculptural installation at the Observatory Hill Rotunda in Sydney, to be presented free to the public from October 13 to November 5.

Anri Sala. Photograph courtesy of Kaldor Public Art Projects

Titled The Last Resort, the installation will feature a transformation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K622 – completed in 1791 just two months before he died – and three years after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney. An orchestral recording of Sala’s variation on the concerto, recorded with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, will be played through hidden speakers in the rotunda, which will trigger a response from 38 mechanised snare drums suspended from the ceiling, creating a dialogue between past and present.

Commenting on the installation, Sala said: “I look at this work like a musical artefact that we have thrown in the ocean … the winds, the waves, the water currents take it one way and the other and it eventually reaches somewhere, though not as it originally started out as it is transformed by the journey.”

Speaking to Limelight, John Kaldor, Director of Kaldor Public Art Projects says: “An artist of his stature could have said, ‘look, just take one of my successful pieces and show it in Australia’ but he actually made a great effort to read up about Australia – the history of Australia and the connection of Australia to Europe – and create a new work, which is fantastic.”

Sala is an internationally celebrated artist and filmmaker. Born in Tirana, Albania in 1974, he studied art in Paris and, in 2003, moved to Berlin where he now lives and works. He represented France at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 with a work called Ravel, Ravel, Unravel which featured two adjacent video screens on which two pianists played interpretations of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major, composed for Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm during World War I. Sala altered the tempo for each so that the performances moved in and out of sync with each other.

In 2014, he won the Vincent Award, one of Europe’s most prestigious contemporary art awards, and in 2016, the most comprehensive survey of his work to date – Anri Sala: Answer Me – was presented at the New Museum in New York.

Kaldor Public Art Projects burst onto the scene in 1969 when it presented Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s groundbreaking Wrapped Coast at Sydney’s Little Bay – the first time an international artist had created a large-scale public art project in Australia. In the years since, Kaldor Public Art Projects has hosted numerous renowned artists including Gilbert & George, Nam June Paik and Sol LeWitt.

Other famous Kaldor projects include Jeff Koons’ Puppy, Marina Abramović in Residence and 13 Rooms, all of which have helped change local perceptions of contemporary art. The most recent project, last year, was barrangal dyara (skin and bones) by Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones, a Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi man who presented a vast sculptural installation across 20,000 square metres of Sydney’s Royal Botanic. The project recalled the 19th century Garden Palace building which stood there before it burned to the ground in 1882 taking countless Aboriginal objects with it.

An artist’s impression of Anri Sala’s The Last Resort at the Observatory Hill Rotunda. Image courtesy of Kaldor Public Art Projects

Kaldor tells Limelight that he first met Sala in 2008. “He started off purely as a visual artist with photography and film, and then more and more his works have incorporated music or are based on music. In his newest piece [Take Over, which has just closed] in Berlin, he combined the French national anthem the Marseillaise with the Russian Internationale – so he’s using music in a very conceptual way to turn it into contemporary art,” he says.

“He actually came for a site visit in 2012 and we were going to do a project with him in 2013 but then he was selected to represent France in the Venice Biennale and, of course, he chose that rather than do a project here in Australia but we kept in touch and he was very committed to do a project for us, so here we are.”

Kaldor says that while in Australia, Sala met with artists, writers and intellectuals, including Indigenous artists – “so he really did his homework which is very gratifying.”

In a statement about the new work at the Observatory Hill Rotunda, Kaldor Public Art Projects said: “Sala reveals the geographical, cultural and conceptual shifts that transform the way we see our colonial past today and its Enlightenment foundations. Positioned alongside the historic Sydney Observatory, where colonial time was measured, and maps of the stars sustained the passage of ships moving between the ‘old world’ and ‘the new’, Sala reconfigures and reframes Mozart’s Concerto. He adjusts each movement of the piece, a masterpiece of the European Enlightenment, changing its centre of gravity, altering its tempo and transfiguring its instrumentation with an ensemble of drums.”

“The whole Rotunda will become like an orchestra,” says Kaldor, explaining that Sala has chosen to have the hanging snare drums for several reasons.

“People can go underneath them. But he’s playing also with the notion that Australia is upside down. And when he was in Sydney the flying foxes were in the Botanic Garden and he was very taken by all these bats just hanging off the trees during the day,” says Kaldor.

Sala and his assistant will be in Sydney for a couple of weeks before the installation opens in order to mix the recorded score and drums on site.

Kaldor says that after premiering in Sydney, The Last Resort will be seen in Berlin and New York.


The Last Resort will be at the Sydney Observatory Rotunda, October 13 – November 5

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