The Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) is currently hosting the most extensive solo exhibition to be held in Argentina on the Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs.
Curated by Cuauhtemoc Medina from the Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico, this exhibition will also tour at the National Museum of La Habana, Cuba, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, and LACMA in Los Angeles, USA. You can visit it at MALBA in Buenos Aires until 15th February, 2016.
Entrance to the Francis Alÿs exhibition currently on at Malba (Photo: Pablo Jantus, courtesy of Malba)
“A Story of Negotiation” showcases the diverse ways in which Alÿs continues to explore on-going geopolitical issues. Visitors will be able to engage with Alÿs’ thought-provoking take on migrants and migration, borders and frontiers while exposing real but often forgotten (or made to forget) geo-political structures of power.
The “negotiation” that the exhibition mainly seeks to explore is one between Alÿs’ chosen artistic media and techniques. As the subtitle of the exhibition states, the display is “an investigation into the parallel activities of painting and performance.”
The curator was particularly interested in exploring how, in Alÿs’ hands, painting ceases to be the predominant form of representation, and becomes part of a wider cohort of media (e.g. film, photography, sculpture). Each element represents a different aspect and nature of the political tensions at play in an often-complex subject matter.
But it is the playful and imaginative rendition of each of these components that are all the more fascinating and intriguing. Alÿs interprets truly distressing and concerning issues of contemporary geo-politics through a fable, or a child’s game. In a world where our views on these matters are burdened by constant and biased news coverage and images that get reverberated around social media – all of which impede our critical thinking – imagination offers a way out.
First Room: Migration
Still from Francis Alÿs’ film Don’t Cross the Bridge before you get to the River (Courtesy of Malba)
We remember certain images. The humanitarian photographs depicting suffering migrants and refugees used to encourage donations. Another image: the boat, sometimes it’s sinking. Another one, the police confronting refugees at a border. And a last one: some people arrive to safety, this time in Germany.
Alÿs, meanwhile, uses fantasy to critique reality. He creates a series of imagined encounters, and with that, imagined possibilities. The fantasy of what could be forcing us back onto the present of what it is, triggering fundamental questions of where we stand (and where we cannot).
In one film, Moroccan and Spanish children walk into the sea from their respective shores, holding boat toys made of sandals (of feet), to form an illusory bridge in the stretch of Gibraltar. In his paintings and collages, he creates fantastic fables of moving continents, myths of giant men and women that can cross the world with one step, fantastic bridges of boats that anyone can cross. The world is moving.
Second Room: Mexico and the South
There are whirlwinds that form during the dry season that comes after the maize harvest in the high areas of south Mexico. Francis got a camera, and got into the tornado, capturing the chaos, the violence, the noise, the dirt. It is his metaphor for the social reality of Mexico and the south in general: constant changeability.
Geopolitical forces – like a tornado – come and go, taking and bringing with them, leaving us in “a given situation:” uncertainty, fragmentation, friction, mediation, consensus, corruption.
Imagining is also predicting what might arise. Predicting is preventing. Preventing is stability.
Third (and last) Room: The War in Afghanistan
Two boys play on the streets of Kabul rolling and unrolling a film reel. Alÿs called this film REEL/UNREEL. Real and unreal, just like our images of Afghanistan.
Some images from the news come to mind. Western drones aiming at something, a building, the computerised landscape detached from any human reality. Car bombs. No faces, no people. Alÿs is right: we have let Afghanistan be constructed into a “western fiction.”
Reel-Unreel by Francis Alÿs (Photo: Pablo Jantus, courtesy of Malba)
He asks us to question that. As an embedded artist for the UK army in Helmand, he exercised a kind of self-censorship. Rejecting the often-monotonous photojournalism that ends up on the news, Alÿs opted for abstraction. He adopted the TV “colour bars” that were used to adjust the transmission. Sometimes represented on their own, sometimes blocking our view into Afghanistan. Either way, the colours bars are interrupting the immediacy we’ve become so accustomed to. We can’t see. We need to imagine. We must tune in by ourselves.
Francis Alÿs successfully explores the human imagination as a space for critical inquiry. When you visit the exhibition, try doing it his way: imagine, then think.
Part of Francis Alÿs’ work from Afghanistan (Photo courtesy of Malba)
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