Long Sorrow, 2005
Information about the artwork
- MaterialVideo (digitalized), projection, color, audio (stereo)
- EditionAP 2/3 (aus einer Edition von 6)
- Duration12:57
- Year of acquisition2009
- Inventory numberUAB 661
- On viewOn view
- Copyright© Anri Sala, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
More about the artwork
Anri Sala’s films, photographs, and videos probe the boundaries of history and geography, often from the perspective of marginal figures who, almost incidentally, become protagonists of collective dramas.
In Sala’s video work “Long Sorrow,” the renowned free jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc appears, playing his instrument. He is situated at a dizzying height outside an 18th-floor window of a somber, high-rise housing block—effectively the film’s second protagonist. The building, which spans over 700 meters in length, is a large residential complex in northern Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel neighborhood. It was designed by the Lyon-based Corbusier student René Gagès and the Berlin architect Volker Theißen and completed in 1968. Although the residents gave it the nickname “Langer Jammer”—in English, “Long Sorrow”—the building remains highly popular to this day. The name became the title of Sala’s film, which is part documentary, part metaphor, and can also be read as a guiding principle for Moondoc’s musical improvisation.
