From May 20 to August 3, 2025, OTO SOUND MUSEUM presents Time No Longer by Anri Sala, featured for the first time in its exclusively sonic form. In its original audiovisual installation Time No Longer (2021) depicts a turntable floating in a space station, tethered only by its electric cord, still playing a vinyl record in the apparent absence of humanity. The turntable seems to spin in the aftermath of some catastrophe, serving as a reminder of absent lives. In the new OTO's presentation, the visual element disappears, shifting the focus entirely to sound and imaginative experience. The music we hear is a reimagined version of French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Written during World War II while Messiaen was imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, the quartet was performed in 1941 with three fellow prisoners, using only instruments they could find. Messiaen’s composition, one of the most poignant works created in captivity, reflects the profound isolation and despair of war but also the fragile human need to create something beautiful amid suffering. Sala was particularly moved by the quartet's solo movement, The Abyss of the Birds, written for clarinet by Messiaen’s fellow prisoner, Henri Akoka.
Sala found a haunting complement to Akoka’s clarinet in the story of Ronald McNair, one of the world’s first Black astronauts to have reached space, but also an accomplished professional saxophone player, who had planned to play and record a saxophone solo on board the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Tragically, the shuttle disintegrated seconds after take-off, killing everyone on board. Sala felt that composing a saxophone part for ‘The Abyss of the Birds’ would subtly re-envisage a piece that was never played where it was intended, and also form a duet between two instrumental voices – empathetic and interdependent through what they have endured. Emphasizing the profound loneliness of both men’s experiences, linking outer space with the confined space of incarceration, Time No Longer creates a duet that speaks of endurance, empathy, and absence.

Anri Sala

Anri Sala constructs transformative, time-based works through multiple relationships between image, architecture, and sound, employing these as elements to fold, capsize, and question experience. His works investigate ruptures in language, syntax, and music, inviting creative dislocations, which generate new interpretations of history, supplanting old fictions and narratives with less-explicit, more-nuanced dialogues.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions atBourse de Commerce, Paris (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2021); Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston (2021); Centro Botìn, Santander (2019); Mudam, Luxembourg (2019); the Castello di RivoliMuseo d’ArteContemporanea, Turin (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017); the New Museum, New York (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012);Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2008);and ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004). He has also participated inmajor group exhibitions and biennials internationally, including the57thVenice Biennale (2017), dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), the29thSão Paulo Biennial (2010) and the4th BerlinBiennale (2006). In 2013, he represented France in the55th Venice Biennale.