ART CITIES:Beirut-Francis Alÿs
Francis 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.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Beirut Art Center Archive
The first exhibition of Francis Alÿs in Lebanon “Knots’n dust” presents early and recent works that explore themes of turbulence: the motions at the core and their outspread effects, ranging from the miniscule to the monumental. The exhibition reflects on the notion of turbulence, from instability to total chaos, from meteorological phenomena to geopolitical manifestations, from a simple knot in the hair to an ascending spiral. Knots represent links and bonds, as well as resistance and binding, they are the smallest unit in the making of a fabric yet they are its sine qua non mechanic condition: a continuous surface that can bring some opacity, some support for projection, inscription, hiding, drawing and building. His project was two-years in the making with Marie Muracciole for Beirut Art Center, around a new animation film, with working title “Exodus 3:14” that portrays a female character completing a benign and beautiful gesture that the loop transforms in a Sisyphean task. With this knot, a vortex opens itself; the hair infinitely undoes itself as in a gesture of self-absorption in which she appears both engaged and detached. On display are six small canvases connecting tornados to hair, whilst they associate with the motion of sketching. “Knots (walks) Mexico” (2006) produces its own code of registering the incidents of a walk: the small reactions, movements and accidents that happen to the stroller. These notes are written with different knots accompanied by their translation on a sheet of paper, tying the knots to actions and situations. “Tornados” is a 33 minute video where the artist chases “dust devils” and attempts to enter their eye with a camera in hand. Francis Alÿs then films their windless core, a monochrome of dust that literally abstracts him from the outside world. As a local echo of this series, the show includes photographs taken by Alÿs in the streets of Beirut in 2015 during a sand storm. Was this yellow dust traveling with the wind from the uncultivated soil of the neighboring countries Iraq and Syria, where war previously held most of the agriculture? In many regions there, the soil is not fixed anymore by roots and plants and has becomes volatile after years of conflicts. The desert walks and flies away, the political situation draws a migrant landscape from one desolated country to a modern metropolis that receives a veil of dry mud.
Info: Curator: Marie Muracciole, Beirut Art Center, Jisr El Wati – Off Corniche an Nahr. Building 13, Beirut, Duration: 31/1-9/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, Wed 12:00-22:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.beirutartcenter.org
