TIRANA LEGO PROJECT (005)

CPH:DOX’s new project – ARTKINO – kicks off with the World Premiere of a new film by one of the visual art scene’s most renowned video artists: Anri Sala. The film – TIRANA LEGO PROJECT – was created in collaboration with the Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. “Tirana Lego Project” is the Albanian artist Anri Sala’s film about Olafur Eliasson’s Lego project in the Albanian capital, Tirana. With three tons of white Lego bricks placed on Pyramid Square in central Tirana, Eliasson involved the city’s children over ten days in building a vision for a future city. This process is the central focus of the film. Anri Sala, born in 1975 in Tirana, Albania, has since the exhibition After the Wall (1999, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) – which presented new art from post-communist Europe – established himself as one of the most remarkable young artists within the video art genre. Anri Sala’s visual language – in contrast to the speed of mass media – is a meditation on slowness, often characterized by little or no camera movement and by a keen attention to seemingly insignificant details. In many of his videos, Sala refers to his Albanian background without being overtly political. His strength lies in creating evocative works where the political is present as a subtle undertone. Central themes in Sala’s work include history, cultural identity, language, and migration.

From November 2005 to March 2006, CPH:DOX, in collaboration with Galleri Andersen_s, presents a rotating film program featuring a range of prominent visual artists who all work with documentary expression at the intersection of video art, experimental film, installation, and documentary film. The idea behind the project is both to establish a screening space for documentary-based visual art and to break down the boundaries between documentary film and video-based visual art. The project is sponsored by Montana.