Introduction

At the entrance to the exhibition space at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, a new work was built: Holey Wall (Should I Stay or Should I Go) (2014): a concrete wall in which three segments from the song’s score are perforated, like the cards of the barrel organ. The wall is built like a folding screen, an urban paravant, which allows peeping into the other side, as well as letting in light through perforations.

The notes become a transcript of text and a sculpture with a static yet changing appearance, for it presents a permanent structure with shifting materials. The natural light, dynamic and constantly changing, creates a different image at each hour of the day.

In an interview with Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sala noted that «at the edge of one medium is the possibility of another». This understanding is manifested in the fresco that seems to translate a certain tempo into a tempo of light and visualization. In fact, like the musical variations created from the song Should I Stay or Should I Go, Sala creates a fan of alliterations that are based on light and imagery.

A medium is a means or mediator. Sala seeks to create further dimensions of human mediation where they do not exist, and builds another mediating axis in the Pavilion. Paradoxically, in building the wall he in fact removes a further barrier between the song, with its varied arrangements, and the visitors; and in his work with light he reveals a further facet of the space and makes this specific place accessible to the viewers. [...]

A wall similar to the concrete screen was built in Sala’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, in 2011. There, the wall partly blocked the gallery’s interior from the garden surrounding it. The cut-out notes allowed the sounds to seep out to the garden and enabled voices from the garden to seep back into the exhibition space. Here, too, the different sounds juggled between the spaces and their own private narratives. The echoing of the interior outside, and vice versa, blurred all possibilities of signifying a distinct identity based on familiar categories, thus creating an independent, varied, singular syntax.

– Extract from On the Edge of Otherness: Encounters in Anri Sala’s Exhibition by Noam Segal, Catalogue No Names, No Title / Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2014, pp. 93–78.