On the occasion of Anri Sala’s third solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, we revisit the artist’s long-standing relationship with Mexico and his collaboration with the gallery over the past two decades. Spanning video, installation, photography, and painting, Sala’s work explores the convergence of multiple temporalities—folding time on itself so that sound, space, and image continually reshape one another. Each project becomes a site where temporal layers collapse into a single pulse of perception: a present charged with the residues of the past and the anticipation of the future. Together, these works trace the evolution of Sala’s distinctive approach to time as a malleable substance, revealing an inquiry that listens as much as it renders temporality visible.

Created during the Albanian artist’s first visit to Mexico City in 2002, No Barragán No Cry was exhibited in the air is blue, a group exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Casa Luis Barragán. Artists were invited to engage with the architect’s home through a year of research. Sala began with a photograph he found in Barragán’s digital archive of a white wooden horse, poised mid-stride on a pedestal atop the rooftop terrace. When he finally visited the house, the horse was gone—removed during restoration and never replaced. That absence became the starting point for his own photographs of a real white horse precariously balanced on a circular, custom-built metal pedestal atop a skyscraper in Guadalajara—Barragán’s hometown.

This participatory gesture echoed Le Clash (2010), screened inside the gallery—a film Sala premiered at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. Set in the empty streets of Bordeaux and the abandoned Salle des Fêtes du Grand Parc—a concert hall where The Clash performed more than forty years earlier—Le Clash follows a man slowly turning the crank of a small music box, letting the melody drift into the air. Nearby, another man and a woman push a barrel organ through the streets, the woman’s voice rising softly in song. Their versions of Should I Stay or Should I Go never quite align: the melodies of this punk rock anthem reverberate through the empty city, circling each other in search of a harmony that never resolves.

No Window No Cry (2011) extended this dialogue into architecture. Installed both in a window of architect Juan O’Gorman’s Biblioteca Central at UNAM and as a replica in the gallery, the work features a warped glass pane and a hand-cranked music box that visitors can activate, playing a wistful rendition of Should I Stay or Should I Go over the film’s soundtrack, where the same song is heard. The imperfect alignment between these two versions transforms dissonance into reflection—on the passage of time, on memory, and on the impossibility of perfect synchrony.

That same year, furthering the musical and spatial exploration of his exhibition at kurimanzutto, Sala filmed Tlatelolco Clash (2011) in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The site—where Aztec ruins, a colonial church, and architect Mario Pani’s modernist housing complex converge—is also where, in 1968, the Mexican military under orders from President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz opened fire on hundreds of student demonstrators. In the film, passersby throughout the day approach a barrel organ placed among the ruins, each inserting a perforated sheet containing a section of the score to The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go and cranking out a brief, uneven phrase of the melody. The rectangular perforations of the score echo the surrounding windows, and only as the day—and the film—draw to a close does an edited version of the full song play uninterrupted, transforming the earlier fragments into a collective composition.

Continuing his exploration of how time folds into space and perception, Sala exhibited Clocked Perspective in the elevated plaza of Museo Jumex that same year—a sculptural clock first shown at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel in 2012. The work was inspired by a little-known 1825 painting by G. Ulbricht, held in the collection of Kassel’s Orangerie. In the painting, a castle appears at an angle, its vanishing point off to the left, while the clock on its façade faces the viewer directly—an optical paradox that captivated Sala. Correcting the pictorial illusion into three dimensions, he devised an elliptical clock that mirrors the painting’s perspective: its hands adjust to the warped face, moving faster or slower to compensate for the uneven spacing between numbers.

Installed at Museo Jumex—a former industrial site now surrounded by corporate towers—the work could be viewed from multiple levels: below, across, or from above. It reminds us that time and perspective—like urban space itself—are always experienced in relation to where one stands.

Combining traditional craft with mechanical design, these hybrid instruments explored the threshold where image becomes sound and sound becomes image. Sala described them as “backgrounds brought to the foreground”—wallpaper motifs given voice. Their vibrations turned decoration into score, merging the histories of industrial production, domestic space, and acoustic experimentation. 

On one wall, he staged the meeting of two vintage floral wallpaper patterns, each dating back roughly two centuries. As the cylinder rotated, it created a visual and sonic encounter between the designs, producing melodic phrases tuned across Western and Eastern (Japanese kumoi) tonalities. On the opposite wall, Sala traced a passage from figuration to abstraction: recognizable Disney characters and settings—Bambi, Mickey Mouse, the Seven Dwarfs, and their woodland home—gradually dissolved into evenly spaced lines, their rhythms fading into spectral sound: a reflection on how images, like time, unravel through repetition.

The exhibition brings together three bodies of work. Surface to Air (2023–ongoing) translates Sala’s photographs of clouds taken from airplane windows into frescoes, embedding fragments of Cipollino, Radica, and Tartaruga marble whose veins echo the atmospheric conditions of each composition. Tracing Vista (2025) presents the perforated drawings—spolveri—used to transfer designs onto plaster, ghostly records of the painting process reimagined as independent works.

While evoking Mexico’s muralist tradition—led by artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—Sala’s frescoes resist monumentality. Far from historical re-creations, they join seemingly incompatible temporalities: the digital and the ancient, the fleeting and the enduring. They transform the medium’s permanence into a meditation on painting as a measure of days, gestures, and materials in flux.