Time No Longer

This is the soundtrack to Anri Sala’s immersive work Time No Longer (2021) on view at Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris until January 16, 2023. With this opus which draws on Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Anri Sala creates a part of his dramaturgy, a new space-time. The soundtrack, arranged for clarinet and saxophone from the quartet assembled by Messiaen during his captivity in Germany in 1941, becomes music for the present age, an elegy to Ronald McNair, an African American astronaut and saxophonist who wanted to be the first musician to record in space, and who fell victim to the disaster of the American space shuttle Challenger which exploded 73 seconds after take-off in 1986. A bachelor machine catapulted into space—in the weightlessness of a space station, a turntable spins on its axis at the mercy of invisible cosmic forces. Its arm, like a phantom limb, inserts the needle into the grooves of the record, revealing the variations of Messiaen’s melodic lines, making them twitch and creak with the jolts of a mechanical arm left to the vagaries of chance. The convolutions of the infinite choreography of Time No Longer are deployed in the circular space of the Rotunda, which in turn seems to free itself from the Earth’s gravity. Anri Sala turns our perception of time and space on its head and engages visitors in a cycle of time that is never static but engaged in perpetual movement. Messiaen, inspired by the angel announcing the end of time, was guided in composing his Quartet by hallucinatory visions in the colours of the rainbow provoked by cold and hunger. In turn, Anri Sala makes these lights flash here and now, for a few seconds of eternity. From the Rotunda, the epicentre of the exhibition, sound and visual waves spread out and shake the whole of the Bourse de Commerce right down to its foundations, from which gasping breaths mingle with the accelerated tempos of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” from 1395 Days without Red, a sound portrait of a city fragmented by the siege of Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. For the Bourse de Commerce, Anri Sala has invented a total musical score in which the synchronised works reconfigure the architecture into a “continuum of presence and flow,” in which the spectator plays an active role as the seismograph of a global cartography crisscrossed by the harmonies and dissonances that accompany past and contemporary political upheavals.