The Albanian artist Anri Sala has converted an abandoned house on the island of Teshima, off the west coast of Japan, into a large-scale installation. The ambitious site-specific piece, entitled All of a Tremble, incorporates music boxes decorated in the same pattern as the wallpaper in the property and a video showing footage of a shakuhachi (Japanese flute).
Sala received the commission to work on Teshima after winning the tenth Benesse Prize at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The Japanese conglomerate Benesse and its Fukutake Foundation sponsor a range of art-related activities on the islands of Teshima, Naoshima and Inujima. “The eloquent new work is housed in an old Japanese home that the foundation acquired and restored for Sala, right next to the coast on the Setouchi inland sea,” says a spokeswoman for Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents the artist. The house will be open to the public for the next three years.
Akiko Miki, the curator of All of a Tremble, says in a statement: “The once abandoned house is brought to life, inviting viewers to reflect on the displacement and lives of human beings as well as to physically experience the meeting of two different worlds: outside and inside, eastern and western, ocean and sky, social and private.”
