Francis Alÿs uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress.

Alÿs’s personal, ambulatory explorations of cities form the basis for his practice, through which he compiles extensive and varied documentation that reflects his ideas and process. As one of the foremost artists of his generation, Alÿs has produced a complex and diverse body of work that includes video, painting, performance, drawing, and photography.


Rehearsal I (Ensayo I)
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

This exhibition draws on the Museum’s unique and important collection of Alÿs’s work, highlighting three recent major acquisitions—Re-enactments (2001), When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), and Rehearsal I (Ensayo I) (1999–2001)—which include video installations, paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and newspaper clippings. These works present an investigation of methods of social action, from rehearsals and re-enactments in urban environments that address the politics of public space to large-scale communal participation where the culmination of many small acts achieves mythic proportions.

Re-enactments
2001. Two-channel video (color, sound), drawings, maps, newspaper clippings, photographs, tables, lights.

The exhibition, which is conceptually grouped around these three thematic bodies of work, also includes additional artworks that the artist has developed around the idea of rehearsal and re-enactment in relation to progress in art and everyday life.

Modern Procession
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

La Malinche
1997. Oil on gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 x 6 1/2″ (24.8 x 16.5 cm).

The title “There is always a cup of sea to sail in” was inspired by a line by the poet Jorge de Lima (1895 – 1953) in his work Invenção de Orfeu (1952). The concept of this year’s São Paulo Biennial is based on the notion that it is impossible to separate art from politics. Art, through ways of its own, is “capable of blocking the sensorial coordinates through which we understand and inhabit the world by bringing into it themes and attitudes that did not previously fit in, thus making it different and wider.”

For this Biennial the curators, Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, emphasized the importance of intensifying the contacts with Latin America as well as with Africa. The exhibition displays works by 159 artists from all over the world.

Terreiros: 6 conceptual groupings
The exhibition will unfold six issues relating to political thought and action through art within a unique and integrated curatorial space. Each of the issues that order conceptual groupings in space will have an ambient art project to be developed for activation and public use within a program of corresponding events.

The discussions that guide, and therefore denominate, the conceptual surroundings of each of these terreiros, are:

• The skin of the invisible
• Said, unsaid, forbidden
• I am the street
• Remembrance and oblivion
• Far away, right here
• The other, the same

Some Participants:

1. Alfredo Jaar: The eyes of Gutete Emerita

2. Cildo Meireles: Inserções em circuitos ideológicos: Projeto Cédula

3. Francis Alÿs: Tornado

4. Jean-Luc Godard: Je vous salue Sarajevo [Ave, Sarajevo]

5. Lygia Pape: Divisor

6. Allora e Calzadilla: A movement without development

7. Rosângela Rennó: Menos valia

8. Alessandra Sanguinetti: El tiempo vuela

An exhibition by Francis Alys at Tate Modern takes place during summer 2010 as the experimental artist showcases his work from over the last twenty years. Including painting, installations, animation, sculpture and video art, this exhibition is set to explore the nature of this politically motivated conceptual artist.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Artangel
Guards 2004/05

Alÿs’s work starts with a simple action, either by him or others, which is then documented in a range of media. Alÿs explores subjects such as modernising programmes in Latin America and border zones in areas of conflict, often asking about the relevance of poetic acts in politicised situations. He has used video projection and film but also spreads his ideas through postcards. Painting and drawing remain central to his work too.

Francis Alÿs
Amulantes II (Pushing and Pulling) – detail 1992 – 2003

His presence is unobtrusive, but it always leaves a trace: in The Swap (1995), Alÿs traded objects with commuters in the Metro in Mexico City, where he has lived since 1986. He began with a pair of sunglasses, and ended up with a small wooden dog. Yet the documented trades were not the end of the process: “The protagonist leaves the last object,” Alÿs wrote in his documentation of the event – and who knows what other swaps were triggered by its presence in the eco-system of the Metro?

Francis Alÿs
The Ambassador 2001

The strength of the idea is its simplicity: Alÿs is a kind of story-teller, and his stories have a fabular quality that makes you want to tell other people about them. “If the story is right, if it hits a nerve, it can propagate like a rumour,” he has said. “Stories can pass through a place without the need to settle. They have a life of their own.”

Francis Alÿs
The Nightwatch (still) 2004

On occasion, he has co-opted animals to act as his familiars. He released a fox in the National Gallery (The Nightwatch, 2004) and a mouse in the largest collection of contemporary art in Mexico (The Mouse, 2001). In a work called The Ambassador, he sent a peacock to represent him at the Venice Biennale of 2001. Given Alÿs’s apparent desire to produce work which acquires its meaning through engaging other people, the gesture might be seen as a way of subverting the Romantic cult of the artist as sole begetter of the artistic enterprise. Yet it has more specific meaning, as well: Lynne Cooke says that “Alÿs’s witty lampoon” contains “sly echoes of Aubrey Beardsley and other late nineteenth-century aesthetes, dandies who not only prized this exotic animal, but cultivated a mode of public posturing as integral to a wilfully decadent lifestyle they considered an art form in its own right”.

Francis Alÿs
Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic (The Green Line) 2004

Other works are less susceptible to interpretation. When Alÿs walked around Jerusalem, trailing a ribbon of green paint behind him, he was following the so-called Green Line, which was drawn on a map by the Israeli Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan at the end of the Arab- Israeli war of 1948–1949. It marked the respective positions of Israeli and Arab forces in the final ceasefire, and it has served as a highly permeable boundary between Israel and the West Bank ever since. The piece was called The Green Line (2004), and it fell into a group of works with a longer title that summed up one aspect of Alÿs’s philosophy: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic (2005). “Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or is it more a matter of creating a sensation of ‘meaninglessness’, one that shows the absurdity of the situation?” Alÿs has asked. “And can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard assumptions about the sources of conflict? Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place?”

In 2003 Alÿs went to Patagonia to film the ostrich-like birds called nandus. “The impetus for that project was a story that the Tehuelche people used to hunt nandus by walking after them for weeks, until the birds collapsed from exhaustion,” writes Russell Ferguson. In the end, the artist “felt that his film stayed too close to a conventional nature documentary”, and instead, he made a work called A Story of Deception (2003–2006), which consisted of images of the shimmering heat haze that lay at the end of the dusty roads along which he was travelling. It was, he said, the “perfect image of fuite en avant, of fleeing forwards”, constantly in pursuit of something that lies out of reach.

Francis Alÿs meets these criteria in exemplary fashion, adding to them a personal world brimming with poetic accents and enormous involvement with his neighbors from non-Western cultures. It is precisely this poetic and humanist side that gives his work such an exceptional power of expression. He is a ‘visual poet’, focusing on small situations with big implications on deeply-rooted levels of meaning. His work consists of photos, video, film, and painted works on paper and canvas, in which a striking element is the way he regularly commissions others to execute these paintings.

The Collector/El Colector. 1991-1992 | Metalic dogs magnetized on wheels, video, photographs, maps, sketches and documentation

Turista | 1996

Paradox of Praxis 1 | 1997
Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts; serving as a way to mark time and measure existence.

When Faith Moves Mountains | 2002
A Project for Geological Displacement | Francis Alÿs, collaborating with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina.

On April 11th 2002, 500 voluntiers were called in order to form a line to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. This human comb pushed a certain quantity of sand a certain distance, thereby moving a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune about four inches from its original position. The actual displacement was of an infinitesimal proportion, but not its metaphorical resonance.

El Gringo | 2003
In El Gringo, viewers experience the discomfort of being an outsider when the camera is confronted by a pack of snarling dogs.