Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs was born in Antwerp and has lived in Mexico since 1986. He has built work in which social and political concerns manifest themselves with a poetic delicacy, sometimes almost a tribute to Samuel Beckett. With attention focused on border-like situations in which identity and resistance are played on the threshold of survival, Alÿs proposes performative situations, often anchored anthropologically in the condition of fragile groups or communities that are emotionally, politically or socially peripheral.

His piece in the biennial is a text work with a list of thoughts about events related to artists situated in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. Starting with a reference to the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi and finishing with the birth of Blinky Palermo in the wreckage of Leipzig, Alÿs draws a map of a world in collapse, imagined from his own subjectivity and from moments of the history of modern artists.