The 1986 Challenger was in the air for just 73 seconds.

Then the shuttle turned into a ball of fire and the debris hit the surface of the ocean.

The crew members died, including Ronald McNair.

The physicist, astronaut and saxophonist had set out on a pioneering task.

He wanted to record the first piece of music in space during the flight.

Two years earlier he had to experience that the water that collects in the bell while playing, flowed in all directions in weightlessness.

Back on earth, he upgraded his saxophone.

The rest is a sad story.

But what happens when an instrument covers the galaxy without human intervention? In Anri Sala's monumental multi-channel video installation “Time No Longer” from 2021, a record player hovers in an abandoned space station on the top floor as a tribute to McNair's tragic failure. A power cable connects the ancient device with the environment. Threatening vibrations from space debris cause the tonearm to jump up again and again, the music is interrupted, and the hearing waits for the restart of a piece that Sala, as a specialist in subtle biographies of composers and performers, did not choose by chance. In 2013, the 47-year-old Berliner by choice with Albanian-French roots played in the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale,by converting Ravel's “Concerto for the Left Hand” into a video installation. The piece was intended for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost an arm in the First World War.

A sound painting

This time Olivier Messiaen's “Quartet for the End of Time” will be heard, perhaps the most famous piece of music that was composed in captivity.

His third movement, "Abyss of the Birds", transforms the architecture of the Zumthor building into an acoustic stage of terror on the traces of Tarkowski's cinematic doom and gloom "Stalker".

One of many associations that immediately come to mind - and exactly the effect that Sala would like to trigger in the audience by relying on the sensual added value of experiencing an atmosphere triggered by music and images instead of the laborious understanding of a discourse.

The Frenchman Messiaen experienced his personal apocalypse in a Görlitz prisoner of war camp, where he was deported in 1940. During the nine months he managed to premier the piece with other imprisoned musicians. Suggestive changes in the new version, arranged by the Hungarian-American musician André Vida and the French sound designer Olivier Goinard, clarinet and saxophone in their cool lamentos. They are alienated by eerie all-round noises, which further intensify the feeling of the absence of human life. You drift along, hypnotized, in the company of these sound paintings, although your feet are firmly anchored in a room that promises eternal stability with its exposed concrete walls.