Francis Alÿs: REEL-UNREEL (Afghan Projects, 2010–14) at Museo MADRE The largest solo exhibition by Francis Alÿs (b. 1959, Antwerp) in an Italian public institution to date, REEL-UNREEL (Afghan Projects, 2010–14), will premiere in Italy the film REEL-UNREEL, 2011, alongside a constellation of related paintings, drawings, collages, postcards, documents and a series of ephemeral objects, which constitute what the artist calls the Afghan Projects. Configured together as an archive/storyboard, whose documentary and narrative structure recalls a travelogue made up of images and annotations, the Afghan Projects works like a board on which, posting thoughts and memories, ideas and comments, encounters and suggestions, interpretations and projects, allows the artist to dissolve and identify these works with his own experience in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014. Produced in 2011 at dOCUMENTA (13), REEL-UNREEL is not only the centerpiece of the exhibition but also the symbolic culmination of Alÿs’s artistic practice, by its radical reinvention and re-presentation of the medium adopted, in this case film, its performative matrix and, finally, its combination of critical engagement and aesthetic practice. The title refers both to the action presented in the film and the film itself, which reels on and off the film projector, with a further assonance between the terms reel/real and unreel/unreal adopted by the artist to indicate the fictional, or simply unreal, knowledge in the West of the reality of contemporary Afghanistan. Inspired by the classic street game of rolling a hoop or wheel, an exercise in dexterity that consists of keeping it going with a stick for as long as possible without letting it fall, in the film we witness two children who “reel and unreel” two spools of film through the streets of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. e-flux/announcements/francis-alys-3/
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 01:00:00 +0000
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