Francis Alÿs | REEL-UNREEL
It was more than one year ago since we first met Francis Alÿs’ work. We were at Kirschgarten Haus in Basel and the Belgian artist (b. 1959 Antwerp) – who moved to Mexico City in 1986 where he chose to become a visual artist – dressed the part of collector and art curator showing his unusual, fetishist, somehow obsessive, but absolutely unique and amazing collection of amateur and professional reproductions of Jean-Jacques Henner’s 1885 portrait of Saint Fabiola.
After travelling around the world with the retrospective Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, which was displayed at Tate Modern in London, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brussels, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York; and after been featured at dOCUMENTA 13, the works by the international artist are now on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York with his solo show REEL-UNREEL (title from the video of the same name presented in Kassel).
Francis Alÿs’ projects come from his daily observations of events and situations taken from the street. Using different media – photograph, video, installation, drawing and painting – the versatile artist depicts the surrounding reality in different perspectives, sometimes apparently insignificant, but always connected with economic, political and social issues emerging in urban dimensions and analysed with a personal and poetic approach. Through the repetition of ordinary actions, such as children’s games (to which he dedicated a long series of movie), the artist focuses on anthropological themes related to immigration, urban development, modernisation and cultural preservation, conformism and human failures.
In REEL-UNREEL, Kabul, Afghanistan (2011), the twenty-minute video created in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi, Alÿs shows two Afghan children, who keep a film reel – instead of the classical hoop – in continuous motion from the hills, through the old city and the downtown market area of Kabul to the opposite hills, one boy running and unwinding the strip of film, while the other follows him, rewinding it. The game repeatedly goes on until the film turns up in a small fire on the street that breaks it and the reel falls over a cliff, which overlooks the city. The movie, giving a symbolic value to small and simple gestures, refers to the Kabuli fire of 5th September 2001, when Taliban set fire to the Afghan reel archive and it has mostly to do with the lack of respect for heritage and cultural places, which needs to be preserved.
The exhibition presents also a series of canvases of colour bars, painted during the preparation of the video in Afghanistan, which are characterised by bright strips reminding TV test patterns that cover part of the represented daily scenes and help the artist to take some distance from that heavy experience. “I needed to step out of it (…) I cannot paint violence” said the artist, who constantly turns his attention to contexts in which he is both stranger and active player.
REEL-UNREEL show will run at David Zwirner’s 525 West 19th Street spaces in New York until 9th February 2013. Many thanks to the gallery staff for its availability and kindness.
Monica Lombardi
