Trained as an architect, Alÿs turned to a visual arts based practice in the early 1990s as a more immediate, direct, and effective way of exploring issues related to urbanization, to the ordering and signification of urban space and to the semiotics of its use. His work initiates with a simple action, either by him or others, which is then documented in a range of media. Alÿs explores subjects such as modernizing programs in Latin America and border zones in areas of conflict, often asking about the relevance of poetic acts in politicized situations. Documentation is central to his practice as well as painting, drawing, and video. In his work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) made in collaboration with Mexican critic Cuauhtemoc Medina, Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time form one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. Critic Jean Fisher linked Alÿs’ work to the radical event of precipitating a crisis of meaning, where the exposure of a void of meaning is confronted by its social situation, leading up to some kind of truth. Francis Alÿs was born in Belgium in 1959. He lives and works in Mexico City.
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...