Francis Alÿs
1959, Antwerp, Belgium. Lives in Mexico City, Mexico
A catastrophe is not something that can be easily represented. Nevertheless, for the 32nd Bienal, Francis Alÿs produced In a Given Situation (2010-2016), a project that examines contemporary endemic problems through the creation of three types of image: painting, drawing and video. The mirrors, placed in the panels that support the exhibition's artworks, partially display notes on the back of the pictures and create echoes between the works. At the same time, they expand the perspective on the installation and introduce the outside to the inside – the spectator, the park, the exhibition – creating other images. In the paintings, we can see heavy storms and muddy skies, dramatic landscapes and situations. In turn, the drawings are collections of exercises and attempts to categorise and understand a given situation. The video examines the possible causes of these catastrophes. However, Alÿs doesn't usually mimic the ordinary. Opposed to easel painting, his unique and autonomous artworks are devices that only make sense in a set: artwork, space and public. In this sense, the mirror functions as a synthesis and frontier, a tri-dimensional line demarcating the portrayed and the reflected, involving the public and the context. The reflections on the mirrors materialise the tension between the prospect of catastrophe in the artworks and the visualisation of the surroundings. As an important element of Alÿs' daily practice of investigation, his drawings have been part of his work for years. They are mental maps, graphic – almost mathematical – models of social, biological and linguistic phenomena, microcosms in which he tests the relations and tensions between words, shapes and images. They are at the same time fable-like and scientific, puerile and technical, lending fantasy to reality, making visible and elastic – even if for a single moment – processes of organising and negotiating the narrated crisis. Questioning the representation of catastrophe is an element that can be traced in his previous works, such as Tornado (2000-2010) – exhibited at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo – which is the record of years of trying to get inside tornados in search of images of chaos, of the acceleration of history's pace and the unsuitability of calculation as a way to give meaning to the world. The same happens in the video A Story of Deception (2003-2006), shot in Argentinean Patagonia as a long-take loop of a road on the desert that disappears in a mirage of fascination and distance from a promised future, with particular resonance in Latin America. Alÿs' works are a practice of knowledge in which he untangles the opposition between narration and demonstration, prioritising testing over reflecting. What is the relation between present-day catastrophe and the deception historically promoted by the discourses of progress and modernising projects? How can we link the reflections on the mirrors with the landscapes on the paintings, tensions on the diagrams, rumours on the scenes hidden in the back of the frames? His aim is not to impose a diagnosis on the catastrophe, but to create a brief space where the forces at play are suspended, using the world's image-remains to question the nature of representation. ——Guilherme Giufrida
Untitled, 2016. Oil on canvas. 25.3 × 32.3 cm (each).