Anri Sala: Time No Longer | Weingarten Art Group

Type
Public
Date
March 2021
Artist
Anri Sala
Date
March 2021
Location
Houston, Texas

Our second curated public art installation in the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, two years in the making, is a site-specific immersive artwork commissioned from internationally-renowned artist Anri Sala.

Time No Longer fully activates the unique underground space with a 13-minute CGI film of a turntable rotating in zero gravity in the International Space Station (ISS). The turntable’s stylus, the lead “actor” in the film, invokes an acrobatic intelligence with its intermittent playing of a rearranged Olivier Messiaen composition on the vinyl record. Lighting effects complete the experience as they cycle through a truncated sunrise/sunset sequence, much as is experienced on the ISS.

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A 22’ x 143’ screen made of Holo-Gauze, a practically invisible projection surface, allows viewers to experience the film as they make their way around the 360-degree perimeter of the Cistern, with the 221 columns “interrupting” the imagery in a filmic fashion.

Accompanying the CGI film is a new arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s famous composition “Quartet for the End of Time.” Sala selected this piece after learning the story of astronaut Ronald McNair, one of the first black astronauts and a professional saxophonist, who was to have played and recorded a solo onboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

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