Anri Sala

Ghosts Games

Ghost Games by Anri Sala follows the enigmatic dance of crabs steered by a flashlight in the darkness of night on a South American beach. The video produces a surreal impression, typical of Sala’s work, with no plot in the classical sense, no story being told. Like in Blindfold (2002), in which a sunrise is reflected in urban billboards, and Time After Time (2001), in which the figure of a horse emerges from darkness lit by the headlights of an automobile, Sala likes to explore the phenomenon of light and its effects; In Ghost Games, he uses the threatening reflection of the flash light through the darkness of the beach. But unlike several of Sala’s videos’ deliberately slow style, where sometimes the camera does not even move at all, this film is punctuated by the erratic moves of the monster-like creature, its ghostly disappearances into sand holes; the crab’s occasional encounters with the feet of unidentified people standing in the sand, at times like an aggressive dance of protagonists, dramatically adds to the creepy feeling of the scene.