Celebrated French-Albanian artist Anri Sala created an innovative new installation of sculpture and sound for the 33rd Kaldor Public Art Project, which was developed over three years ahead of its world-premiere in Sydney. The Last Resort was co-presented with Art & About Sydney.

Sala’s project transformed the Observatory Hill Rotunda, a site with expansive views from the most elevated point in the city. Audiences were invited to step beneath a gravity-defying ensemble of custom-built drums, to experience their rhythmic, live response to a contemporary interpretation of a Mozart Concerto. Set against the sights and sounds of the harbour below, this musical dialogue animated the relationship between sound, place, time and history on this evocative site. These themes formed the basis of a vibrant suite of public programs presented during the project in partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

For The Last Resort Sala reimagined Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, a seminal piece from the Western canon and a musical expression of the European Enlightenment. Mozart’s score is upended, as if it were a message in a bottle carried from Europe across the ocean to Australia, affected by wind and waves. This abstraction of the score’s structure expresses the way shifts of location, time and perspective alter meaning.

Sala has achieved international acclaim for his works, which explore themes of loss and language, as well as the relationship between sound, space and architecture. These themes have been expressed through poetic video works, live performance and recordings, sculptures and installation. In recent works Sala has explored the complex interplay between live and recorded musical compositions.