Francis Alÿs
08 May - 01 August 2011
|
| © Francis Alÿs
Untitled, from When Faith Moves Mountains. 2002.
Color photograph
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Speyer Family
Foundation, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Marie-Josée and Henry R.
Kravis, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro,
The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, and Committee on Media Funds. |
| |
FRANCIS ALŸS
A Story of Deception
8 May - 1 August, 2011
Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp, Belgium) 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.
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. 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.
www.moma.org
|