Opening Day of Anri Sala’s “Time No Longer” in the BBP Cistern

“Time No Longer” by Anri Sala in the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern opens to the public on Friday, March 12, 2021. Tickets are on sale now.

A newly commissioned artwork for the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern by multimedia artist Anri Sala (b. 1974 Tirana, Albania), Time No Longer offers an immersive, other-worldly experience of film and sound within this vast, subterranean reservoir on the edge of downtown Houston.

Time No Longer incorporates a film projected onto a massive translucent screen, depicting a weathered turntable floating in a space station, tethered only by its electric cord. The soundscape is a new arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written while the French composer was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during the Second World War. This arrangement, composed in collaboration with André Vida and Olivier Goinard, also references another remarkable musical event: in 1986 Ronald McNair, one of the world’s first Black astronauts to reach space, had planned to play and record a saxophone solo on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. This would have been the first original piece of music recorded in space, had not that journey been suddenly and tragically curtailed.