COURTESY INSTITUT FRANÇAIS
Thirteen years after he won the Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennale in 2001, Albanian video and installation artist Anri Sala won the 2014 Vincent Award on November 21. Given biennially by the Broere Foundation, the award honors a mid-career artist who promotes free expression and communication in Europe. This year’s other nominees, all of whom exhibited work at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Netherlands, were Pierre Huyghe, Manfred Pernice, Willem de Rooij, and Gillian Wearing.
Sala, who will now get €50,000 (about $62,100—a sum greater than Turner Prize winners receive), is known for his works about history and collective memory. The artist won for an installation that combined two films—Le Clash (2010) and Tlatelolco Clash (2011)—and Doldrum (2008), a sound-based work in which a drum plays itself.
Set to barrel-organ and music-box renditions of The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” Le Clash and Tlatelolco Clash mournfully reflect on Mexico City’s past. In the former, a man winds a music box as he walks down a drably-colored Mexican road. Meanwhile, a perforated sheet is fed through a barrel organ. This music is then played at various speeds by different players as they walk through Tlatelolco, the site of 1968 massacre in which Mexican police killed student protesters, in Tlatelolco Clash.
Sala’s award-winning Le Clash can be seen in full on YouTube. Watch it before it’s gone.