Francis Alÿs

He has created artwork and performance art that explore urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence. Alÿs carries out paseos — walks that resist the subjection of common space. Cyclical repetition and mechanics of progression and regression also inform the character of Alÿs' actions and mythology — Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently uses rumor as a central tool in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling. He has documented children's games for decades.

• Name — Francis Alÿs • Born — 22 August 1959 • Birthplace — Antwerp, Belgium • Known for — * Conceptual art • Performance art • Video art • Painting • Installation art • Notable Works — * Paradox of Praxis 1 • When Faith Moves Mountains • The Green Line • Tornado • The Silence of Ani • Children's Games • Movement — * Contemporary art • Social practice • Awards — * blueOrange Prize (2004) • BACA-laureate prize (2010), • EYE Art & Film Prize (2018) • Rolf Schock Prizes (2020) • Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award (2020) • Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2023)

Alÿs' body of works encompasses many media. Whereas in the earlier years the actions were mostly performed by the artist himself, over the past decade children have become the main protagonists of his projects. These public actions are documented in video, installations, paintings, and drawings. Alÿs focusses on anthropological and geopolitical concerns centred around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which he has described as "a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables."

Many of his works involve observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic fabric of specific locations, commonly taking place during walks through urban areas. Citing the act of walking as the centre of his practice, for his first performance The Collector (1991), he dragged a small magnetic toy dog on wheels throughout the streets of Mexico City so as to collect any metallic residue lying in its path. In Fairy Tales (1995), he takes a walk after unravelling the sweater he has on, leaving an ever-lengthening, blue-thread trail in his wake. Also in 1995, Alÿs realized an action in São Paulo called The Leak in which he walked from a gallery, around the city, and back into the gallery trailing a dribbled line from an open can of blue paint. This action was reprised in 2004 when Alÿs traced a line of paint following the 1948 cease-fire border in Jerusalem, known as 'the green line', carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked. The work Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) documents an action performed on the streets of Mexico City in 1997. The film depicts a simple and seemingly pointless endeavour, where a large block of ice is pushed through the city streets for nine hours until it melts away to a puddle of meltwater. Rachel Spence sees Alÿs in this action as "an artist who marries surreal whimsy with ethical commitment". The artist describes the work as a settling of accounts with minimalist sculpture. In his critique of this art form, Alÿs also chooses a simple formal language – the block of ice is a cuboid. In Paradox of Praxis 1 he addresses a spatial structure, although he does not relocate it to a gallery or to a stable public space, but to a public space that is altered and expanded until the end of the sculpture’s performance is reached. Through the act of pushing, the minimalist cuboid gradually loses its form. Not only is the ‘gallery’ in flux, the object itself is transformed. It dissolves into the urban space, which thereby becomes an element of the artistic process. The smaller the block of ice becomes, the more the space comes to the fore. Ultimately, the urban space takes the place of the sculpture, becoming the actual subject of the artwork. The Rehearsal (1999) consists of a 30 min static take of a red VW Beetle driving up the slope of a dirt road in a shantytown of Tijuana while the viewer hears musicians rehearsing a song. Every time they stop playing, the car rolls backwards down the hill, as if running out of petrol, but when the music starts up again, the car starts driving up the hill once more. In Tornado (2000-2010), spliced film clips show Alÿs chasing after huge dust devils kicked up by the annual dry season in Milpa Alta, a region near Mexico City that is particularly prone to them. Kara L. Rooney writes of the piece in The Brooklyn Rail, "The sight of his lean frame racing towards the twisters is at once ridiculous and hysterical—blithe qualities that quickly give way to gravitas as the artist physically enters the eye of the storm. Inside, chaos reigns and Alÿs, unprotected except for his handheld camera, is enveloped and pummeled by flying bits of sand, dust and dirt." In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers (mostly university students) in Ventanilla District outside of Lima, Peru to move a sand dune 500 meters in diameter, 10 centimetres. Frieze, who named the work No.19 of "The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century", said that the work was "A distillation of Latin America’s long history of colonial conquest, migration and urban development, the ephemeral work is also a parable for the necessary labour – and belief – required to realize social transformation." Art critic Jean Fisher writes that "the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth." Between 2004 and 2005 Alÿs collaborated with Artangel on several projects regrouped under the title of Seven Walks. In one of them, The Nightwatch (2004), a wild fox called Bandit was set free in the National Portrait Gallery while its wanderings were filmed by the surveillance cameras of the museum. For Performa 05, Alys created Ensayo II (2005) in collaboration with Rafael Ortega. The performance juxtaposed high and low in a staged performance featuring a striptease artist (Bella Yao), a classical pianist (Alexander Rovang), and a soprano (Viktoria Kurbatskaya). In the project Don't Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008), a line of children with shoe boats leaves Europe towards Morocco while a line of kids with shoe boats leaves Africa towards Spain, with the lines eventually meeting on the horizon. As in many of Alÿs' video projects, his collaborators were Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, Felix Blume and Ivan Boccara. For Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Alÿs contributed with Lada Kopeika Project (2014), a "road trip" that concludes with the Lada car crashing into a tree in the courtyard of the Hermitage. The Silence of Ani was realized in 2015 with a group of teenagers from Kars, Turkey. It takes place on the present Turkish-Armenian border in the once Armenian City of Ani which, after centuries of successive invasions and sackings, lies today in a state of total abandon and decay. Alÿs gave instruments to imitate birdcalls to the teenagers; they entered the city walls and, hiding in the rubble, called the birds to create the illusion that the city was coming back to life.

"I was profoundly under the spell of pre-Renaissance painting during my years of university in Italy: from Lorenzetti to Fra Angelico. Even to this day, my iconography is a combination of that imagery and the language of Mexican sign painting. This blend allowed me to find a personal way of materializing images. I've never been that interested in a painterly style. My images are most often mentally resolved— 'imagined'—by the time they make it to the canvas." In the early nineties, Alÿs collaborated with Mexican sign-painters ("rotulistas") to paint enlarged and elaborated versions of his small paintings, which they were invited to reproduce at their own taste. The generic name of this project was The Liar, the Copy of the Liar (1997). His intention is to challenge the idea of the original artwork, rendering the process of making more anonymous and deflating the perceived commercial value of art. The paintings of the series Le temps du sommeil were begun in 1996 and often worked on at night. They feature dreamlike scenes involving tiny suited men and women acting out strange rituals reminiscent of children's games and gymnastic experiments. Many of these images anticipate and recall the forms he has employed in his actions, but the paintings connect to his actions in other ways too since their surfaces are worked and re-worked. The fact that the images are never final but rather are palimpsests, suggests the deep connection between figurative painting and action art that lies at the heart of Alÿs' work. "What justifies my recourse to painting is that it's the shortest way — or sometimes the only way — to translate certain scenarios or situations that cannot be said, that cannot be filmed or performed. It's about entering a situation that could not exist elsewhere, only on the paper or canvas. [...] Also, painting allows me to retreat from the sometimes hectic rhythm of the performances and film productions, and to distance myself without losing contact with them. [...] When I am translating an ongoing film plot into an image, I'll try to create an image that reflects the intention behind the plot rather than illustrating the facts of the film. It functions more like a correspondence, a pendant."

Since 1994, Alÿs has been collecting copies of Jean-Jacques Henner's painting of Fabiola, a fourth-century patrician Roman woman who, despite divorce and remarriage, did such fervent penance that she was welcomed back to the faith and, after her death, sainted. Through a novel written by Cardinal Wiseman, Fabiola regained popularity in the middle of the nineteen century. Alÿs acquired copies of Fabiola portraits painted by amateurs in flea markets and antiques stores, in places as various as Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Lebanon and Russia. The paintings have been left in their original state. The artists, dates, and places of origin are often unknown. Alÿs explained his interest in these pictures: 'It made me question the status of an icon. What is an icon? Is an icon defined by official art history? Or is an icon defined by, in this case, what seems to be an amateur painter's obsession with a particular image?'

Between 2010 and 2014, Alÿs traveled extensively to Afghanistan following his invitation to participate in dOCUMENTA(13). In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi, he produced Reel-Unreel (2011), a 20 min film. The camera follows two young Afghan boys as they chase the reel rolling down the hills of Kabul, with one boy unrolling the strip of film and leading the way, while another follows him, rewinding it. The title Reel-Unreel alludes to the real/unreal image of Afghanistan conveyed by the media in the West: how the Afghan way of life, along with its people, has gradually been dehumanized and, after decades of war, turned into a Western fiction. In 2013, he was an embedded war artist with the UK's Task Force in the province of Helmand (Adrenalotourism, 2013). Originally invited by the Baghdad-based Ruya Foundation to do a project in Yezidi refugee camps, Alÿs' main focus of production from 2015 to 2020 took place in Iraq. As a war artist again he accompanied a Peshmerga battalion during the Kurdish offensive to free Mosul from the Islamic state of occupation. In that region Alÿs has also developed projects such as Hopscotch (2016), produced in collaboration with the Yazidi Refugee Camp of Sharya, Duhok, Iraq; Color Matching (2016), filmed during his embed with Kurdish forces; Salam Tristesse (2018) produced in collaboration with the Yazidi Refugee Camp of Kabarto and lastly Sandlines, the Story of History (2020), a feature film where the children of a mountain village near Mosul reenact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret agreement of Sykes/Picot signed in 1916 to the realm of terror established by the Islamic State in 2016. Sandlines premiered in 2020 at festivals like Sundance, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Mexico City's FICUNAM. Alÿs continues to add to his long-running film series Children's Games (1999–present) which has amassed some 50 videos of children playing games in places in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, Europe, and Hong Kong. The series reflects the artist's habit of 'making contact' with a different culture by seeing and filming how children play.

Solo Exhibitions • Year — Title — Institution — Location — Ref. • 1999 — Venice Biennale — Venice • 2001 — Venice Biennale — Venice • 2004 — Carnegie International • 2006 — Portikus — Frankfurt • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden — Washington DC • 2007 — Hammer Museum — Los Angeles • Venice Biennale — Venice • 2008 — Irish Museum of Modern Art — Dublin • 2010 — The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago • 2010-11 — A Story of Deception — Tate Modern — London • 2015-17 — A Story of Negotiation — Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo — Mexico City • Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) — Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires • Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana — Havana • Art Gallery of Ontario — Toronto • 2013 — Museum of Contemporary Art — Tokyo • Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art • 2017 — Venice Biennale — Venice • 2018 — Manif d’art, Québec City Biennale — Québec • Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) — Shanghai • Art Sonje Center — Seoul • 2019-20 — Children’s Games — Eye Filmmuseum — Amsterdam • 2020 — Museo Nacional de Colombia — Bogotá • 2021 — Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts — Lausanne • 2022 — Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game — Belgian Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale — Venice • Copenhagen Contemporary — Copenhagen • Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts — Taipei • 2023 — Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) — Mexico City • 2023-24 — Wiels Centre d'Art Contemporain — Brussels • 2024 — Museo de Arte de Zapopan — Zapopan, Mexico • Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) • Barbican Art Gallery — London • 2024-25 — Museu de Serralves — Porto • 2025 — Museo Ludwig — Cologne •? — The Museum of Modern Art — New York •? — MoMA PS1 — New York