Unravel... (Honor)

A highlight of Sunday's exploration of national pavilions was France, and Anri Sala's peculiar and moving video installation.

Playing on the name of the composer, Maurice Ravel, and the English word unravel, the installation, which borrows Germany's grand and lofty pavilion, this year (they swapped!), incorporates three cinema rooms, and these rooms together tell a curious narrative. The first examines the face of a woman, intensely focused and attentive on something we don't fully understand. There is music, but it stops and starts, slurs and squeals, slides and stops again. Her expression is mesmerising, and her face dominates the room.

The second room features two screens, two films and two soundtracks, both showing a performance of Ravel's Concerto in D for the Left Hand, but each by a different pianist. All we can see are their hands on the keys. The inevitably unique interpretations cause the two soundtracks to fall in and out of synchronisation, sometimes dramatically, as one pauses to draw out a tension in the music, while the other stops only fleetingly before forging on. This central room is enormous and dark, and its fabulously geometric soundproofing is a work of art in itself. The film lasts the duration of the concerto, and despite the double soundtrack, the music is arresting and the quivering, trilling, running hands as fascinating as the face in the previous room.

The final room takes a broader view, as we return to the woman in the first film, and gain an understanding of her unusual obsession. We see her standing in the very pavilion in which we stand. She is casually dressed, alone in the towering, sunlit room, with her hands busy at two spinning turntables. She is trying to synchronise the two Ravel soundtracks, using small and gentle movements of her hands on the spinning records, her expression deeply attentive. The experience of watching someone listening is wonderful.

I don't know what it is intended to be about, but I found resonance in the twin strivings - on the one hand (as it were) to be unique, and stand apart; and on the other, to forge an impossible correlation, a perfect synchronicity.

Here's a glimpse to give you an idea.