Francis Alÿs Exhibition “Gibraltar Focus”

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Finished

Artists

Francis Alÿs

Charging into a tornado kicking up swirls of dust with a hand-held camera, pushing a huge block of ice around the streets of Mexico City from morning till night until it melts, Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) takes seemingly reckless and absurd actions as an allegory of the society in which we live, highlighting aspects of reality we can not afford to ignore. Tackling the city and the numerous issues which lie hidden beneath its surfaces, Alÿs brings such a presence into the light through individual street actions to large-scale projects that involve several hundred participants captured through video, photography, and narratives formed of paintings, drawings, and various other media, with his humorous poetic delivery of local social and political issues providing an universal appeal.

Part 2 of Alÿs’ solo exhibition introduces his new, large-scale project that took place across the Gibraltar Strait, which separates Africa and Europe. Alluding to the issue of immigration, Alÿs engages in an imaginative attempt with children to connect the two continents in a project presented through videos, installations, paintings and drawings.

Schedule

Jun 29 (Sat) 2013-Sep 8 (Sun) 2013