Catalogue of Francis Alÿs' exhibition at Beirut Art Center.
Knots'n Dust is the title of a monographic exhibition of Francis Alÿs that was held at Beirut Art Center in 2018 following an invitation from Marie Muracciole.
Knots'n Dust started with the video
Tornado (2000-2010) and developed on different forms of turbulence, from a simple instability to total chaos. An unprecedented animation:
Exodus 3:14 (2014-2018), associated the image of the tornado to the sisyphean formation of a simple knot in the hair. A series of postcards established the link between the local meteorological phenomena, resulting from the nearby military conflicts, and different reversals of situations:
Sometimes losing is winning / sometimes winning is losing.
The publication is introduced by a text by Muracciole that redraws on the project's phases. A text by anthropologist
Michael Taussigconsiders the particular spatialization of this exhibition, associating it to the processes of repetition and mechanisms of resemblance, to tackle different aspects of Alÿs' body of work.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Beirut Art Center, from January to April 2018.
Francis Alÿs was born in Belgium in 1959 and trained as an architect before re-locating to Mexico City in 1986, where he has been based ever since. He is best known for his actions which he documents in various ways. Some just involve him walking through the city; other actions are epic events set in dramatic landscapes involving hundreds of participants. Alÿs also works with painting, animation and drawing, and many of the images he creates have a dreamlike surreal quality. His actions are frequently humorous, often transient, and can sometimes seem absurd, but they are always concise and carefully planned. For a long time Alÿs has been interested in spreading news about his work through unconventional means such as rumour, so audiences can interpret his projects in unpredictable ways without seeing images of them. All these poetic qualities lead to his idiosyncratic way of approaching questions to do with urbanism, economics, migration, and borders. Throughout his career he has particularly investigated the processes of modernisation in Mexico and in Latin America.
Texts by Marie Muracciole and
Michael Taussig.
Published by Beirut Art Center.
published in February 2019
bilingual edition (English / Arabic)
22 x 30 cm (softcover)
56 pages (color ill.)
16.00 €
ISBN : 978-9953-0-4563-4
EAN : 9789953045634
currently out of stock
