Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist.

His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his profession as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, where he lives and works.

He has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art that explores urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a broad range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence. Alÿs commonly enacts paseos-walks that resist the subjection of common space.

Cyclical repetition and mechanics of progression and regression also inform the character of Alÿs' actions and mythology-Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently engages rumor as a central tool in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling. He has documented children's games for decades.

Alÿs' body of works encompasses many media. Whereas in the earlier years the actions were mostly performed by the artist himself, over the past decade children have become the main protagonists of his projects. These public actions are documented in video, installations, paintings, and drawings. Throughout his practice, Francis Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which the artist himself has described as "a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables."

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024