Francis Alÿs

In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territories and who has the right to live where.

In “Samples II”, Alÿs walks around London with a drum stick in his hand, playing the sounds of metal fences beside him.

This video performance showcases two works by the artist. In the first, he walks through the streets of London, trailing a wooden drumstick along a series of metal railings, producing a percussive, sometimes bell-like noise. The camera follows behind, focusing on the stick as it strikes the railings. Occasionally, it cuts to wide-angle shots, capturing the awkward and oddly humorous presence of other people. In the second work, titled "Samples II" Alÿs appears even rawer, minimal and radical. He walks around London with a drumstick in hand, creating sounds by playing the metal fences beside him, without a melody. These works are a playful example of one of Alÿs’s ‘interventions’ in the city.

For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.

The video shows the artist walking in circles around the flagpole (“Madre Patria”) in Zócalo, Mexico City’s monumental central square, which is flanked by government institutions. This work relates to a storied incident that took place during the Mexican government’s brutal oppression of the 1968 student uprising in Mexico City.

"Mixing water from the Red Sea with water from the Black Sea". Trabzon, Turkey-Aqaba, Jordan, 2010.