Francis Alÿs

An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being “frozen,” they are contaminated and activated as viral transmitters. Boys and girls sport face coverings, any colour but red, the colour of contagion, worn by the first It. On catching someone the tagger shouts “Contagio!” and the victim echoes, “Contagiado!” Infected! while changing into a red mask (already glimpsed peeping from pockets, in fatalistic preparedness) to become It. The last child standing cries “Survivor!” In August 2021, 43 Mexican minors officially died of Covid; the true figure would be much higher. Tag was always about the menace of other people, but Contagio is brutally literal.

Though mosquitoes have almost as many sensory auditory cells as we do, their hearing is for the sole purpose of finding a mate. Individual males (more wingbeats per second, higher frequency) and females (slower, lower) adjust their flight tones until a pleasing harmony is achieved. These boys have found a pitch irresistible to one sex—hopefully females, for malaria is growing in the DRC, and only pregnant females bite. Eros and Thanatos for the mosquitoes; for the boys, a small but satisfying cull of the horrible hordes.

A sprite in a blue pinafore, plimsolls, and white facemask flits through Hong Kong, enclosed in a quicksilver bubble of magic. Streets become the dull, slow backdrop to her vividness. Oblivious to storefronts and curious stares, seeing only the yellow lines and the cracks in the pavement, she snakes and two-steps around seams and lines without loss of élan, chanting spells that shade into vague sounds. “Step on a line, break the devil’s spine, Step on a crack, break the devil’s back, Step in a ditch, your mother’s nose will itch, But if you step in between, everything will be keen!” By igniting her route with meaning, she briefly wrests public space from the commercial values this city lives by.

The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of terror imposed by the Islamic State in 2016. The children revisit their past to understand their present.

The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of terror imposed by the Islamic State in 2016. The children revisit their past to understand their present.

The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of terror imposed by the Islamic State in 2016. The children revisit their past to understand their present.

The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of terror imposed by the Islamic State in 2016. The children revisit their past to understand their present.

Presented at the Iraqi Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.

One of Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the artist’s nocturnal perambulations through Juárez as he kicks a ball of fire along the city’s desolate streets. Transcending metaphor, the eerie mobile conflagration traces out an imaginary map of a devastated city.

Once upon a time Ani was one of the most important cities of the Middle Ages. People started abandoning the city until all life left and silence fell into Ani. Yet, can't we do better than silence?

The cameras follow a reel of film as it unrolls through the old part of Kabul—pushed by two children, uphill and downhill, like a hoop.

"Mixing water from the Red Sea with water from the Black Sea". Trabzon, Turkey-Aqaba, Jordan, 2010.

"Mixing water from the Red Sea with water from the Black Sea". Trabzon, Turkey-Aqaba, Jordan, 2010.

A traditional animation, hand-drawn in 500+ frames (which are also on display as part of the installation). The animation consists solely of a shoe shine: hands move a length of cloth around and across a shoe, syncopated with a minimalistic melody and lyrics written by the artist. Its swaying, repetitive quality draws the audience into a simple and elegant comparison of artistic labor, in the form of drawing, to the marginalized service economy of a global city.

2005, 00:03:07

In The Green Line (2004), for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territories and who has the right to live where.

In The Green Line (2004), for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territories and who has the right to live where.

The Nightwatch documents an action realised by Alÿs in 2004 in which he released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the middle of the night and used the museum’s CCTV system to follow its movements. The institution was chosen because unlike other institutions it does not conceal its CCTV cameras.

As is well known, ‘gringo’ is the derogatory term Mexicans use to refer to NorthAmerican citizens. Shot in a central province of Mexico, Alÿs’s video portrays the confrontation between a group of dogs protecting their master’s home and an intruder (the cameraman, invisible to the work’s spectators). In this fiction of sorts, the camera takes an active role in the unfolding of the narrative. By examining the way in which its oppressive gaze can be a form of weaponry as much as a shield, it draws attention to how videocameras have become an epitome of power. Acting ‘like a dog among dogs’, Alÿs deliberately set the camera against the animals knowing that dogs loathe direct eye contact. Throughout the film the camera manages to keep the dogs at bay, sometimes providing a physical armour, sometimes actively entering into the game of menace and recognition.

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five hundred volunteers to walk up a sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, shoveling in unison, thus displacing the dune by a few inches. Demonstrating a ridiculous disproportion between an effort and its effect, the work is a metaphor for Latin American society, in which minimal reforms are achieved through massive collective efforts. Participants in the project gave their time for free, reversing conservative economic principles of efficiency and production. Embracing rumor, urban myth, and oral history, Alÿs aims to make works that continue beyond the duration of the event itself, through stories disseminated by word of mouth.

A red VW Beetle drives up a hill, an image which is accompanied by a loud soundtrack of a brass band's rehearsal. The driver is listening to a recording of the rehearsal, and each time the band pauses, he steps off the pedal so the car rolls back down, and the process continued without resolution.

1998, 00:27:42

1998, 00:27:43

The video shows the artist walking in circles around the flagpole (“Madre Patria”) in Zócalo, Mexico City’s monumental central square, which is flanked by government institutions. This work relates to a storied incident that took place during the Mexican government’s brutal oppression of the 1968 student uprising in Mexico City.

The video shows the artist walking in circles around the flagpole (“Madre Patria”) in Zócalo, Mexico City’s monumental central square, which is flanked by government institutions. This work relates to a storied incident that took place during the Mexican government’s brutal oppression of the 1968 student uprising in Mexico City.

For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.

For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.

Semáforos de todo el mundo que el artista ha grabado.

During the 5th Havana Biennial, artist Francis Alys put on his magnetic shoes and took daily walks through the streets of the city, collecting scraps of metal lying in his path.

Politics of Rehearsal (2005) Focuses on the theme of rehearsal, which is so characteristic of Belgian-born, Mexico City-based Francis Alÿs' work. From the start, he has adopted a way of working that tends to reject conclusions in favor of repetition and recalibration.