Published by RM/MUAC. Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Luis Pérez Oramas, Lorna Scott Fox.
Since 1999, Belgian multimedia artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. Children’s Games is an ongoing archive of the urban practices that modernity has banished from everyday life, as the concepts of public space and free time have grown increasingly distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and electronic diversions. Many of these videos were shot in economically underdeveloped regions of the world, where the strength of tradition and community have allowed the shared life of a childhood on the street to survive. The children’s games that Alÿs captures gesture toward a threatened underground culture crossing generations and borders. Their rules, images and references suggest an ancient, potent substrate underlying our shared experience.
Published by JRP|Editions. Edited with text by Nicole Schweizer. Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Judith Rodenbeck.
Published to accompany a major solo exhibition by Francis Alÿs (born 1959) at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in 2021, this monograph presents an overview of the Belgian-born artist’s work in video, painting and drawing, with special emphasis on a central theme of his practice, the act of walking. At the intersection of art, architecture and social practice, his artworks explore urban tensions and the geopolitical stakes of the spaces he explores. From urban strolls to exploring territories and their borders, Alÿs chronicles everyday rituals, habits and experiences through poetic films and works on paper. Among the many projects highlighted in this publication are Alÿs' works related to his Afghan experience and his Children's Games series in which the imaginary spaces of childhood join the artist's poetics of space. Edited and introduced by MCBA Lausanne curator Nicole Schweizer, the book features essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley; Luis Pérez-Oramas, independent curator and writer, New York; and Judith Rodenbeck, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside.
Published by nai010 publishers. Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, David MacDougall, Francis Alÿs, Jaap Guldemond, Marente Bloemheuvel.
Since 1999, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has been documenting children at play in countries across the globe, from rock paper scissors in Mexico City to knucklebones in Kathmandu, Nepal, to hopscotch in a Yezidi refugee camp in Iraq. Amid shouts of laughter and goodnatured bickering, the subjects of Alÿs’ series represent the universality of youthful play and imagination even in politically contentious environments.
Children’s Games is a unique record of humanity through its youngest members, serving as a testament to the time in a person’s life where, despite everything, the biggest conflict was still whether someone had cheated at musical chairs. This book collects Alÿs’ social project of films, performative actions, drawings, documents and paintings into a single publication for the first time, with contributions by curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina and ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall.
Published by Cosac Naify. Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Alfonso Reyes, Ton Marar.
For the past ten years, video camera in hand, Francis Alÿs has chased tornados in the highlands south of Mexico City, hoping to access and film the literal eye of the storm. This volume, full of scrapbook and ephemera appeal, compiles Alÿs' notes, drawings, paintings, press clippings and writings for his film Tornado.
PUBLISHER Cosac Naify
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6.75 x 8.75 in. / 152 pgs / 87 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/31/2011 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 146
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788575039427TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $55.00
Over the past two decades, Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has used postcards to record his work and broadcast his ideas. Twenty-six postcards are gathered together in this affordable artist's book, both a collectible object in its own right and a succinct introduction to Alÿs' career.
Published by Charta/Irish Museum of Modern Art. Afterword by Enrique Juncosa.
The Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959) is known for his walks and tales executed in a wide range of media (documentary film, painting, photography, performance, video and installation) that marry humor and sensitivity, banality and spontaneity, personal and political. A compulsive wanderer, many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of urban life. This beautifully designed volume presents an ongoing series of paintings that function as kind of a storyboard and archive of the artist's oeuvre to date. Begun in 1996, Le Temps du Sommeil ("The Time of Sleep") comprises over 100 paintings accompanied by instructions and postcards related--sometimes obliquely--to the artist's past performative actions. The instructions and paintings are presented en face, giving birth to a text-image dialogue that is sometimes witty and always fascinating. Le Temps du Sommeil affirms Alÿs yet again as an artist always able to surprise.
PUBLISHER Charta/Irish Museum of Modern Art
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 7.75 x 6 in. / 184 pgs / 170 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/30/2010 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2010 p. 96
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881587773TRADE List Price: $49.95 CDN $67.50
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Mark Godfrey, Klaus Biesenbach. Text by Eduardo Abaroa, Klaus Biesenbach, Francesco Careri, Carla Faesler, Mark Godfrey, Boris Groys, Miwon Kwon, Tom McDonough, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Eyal Weizman.
Working in a variety of media and a range of scales, from humble works on paper to monumental staged performances, Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has established himself as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. Based in Mexico City since 1986, the artist fashions much of his work from the street life he observes during long walks throughout the city. Bringing together a variety of participants, from Mexican sign-painters to British Guardsmen, his collaborations have produced several well-known works, including "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002), in which he enlisted 500 volunteers to attempt to move a sand dune one foot from its original position using shovels, and "The Modern Procession" (2002), a ceremonial procession commemorating MoMA's temporary move to Queens, New York, that included a brass band and uniformed participants carrying reproductions of the Museum's most famous works across the Queensboro bridge. Published to accompany the largest retrospective of Alÿs' work to date, this publication is more a guidebook than a conventional monograph, reflecting the spirit of the artist's wandering practice. It features an introductory essay by Mark Godfrey, a curator at the Tate Modern, an index of quotes from Alÿs' previous writings and interviews compiled by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, and descriptions of works written by Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc Medina, freelance curator and art critic, as well as responses to the artist's work from a wide range of critics and commentators.
Published by Turner/MACBA. Edited by Carlos Monsivis.
This visual travelogue of one of the biggest cities of the twenty-first century takes readers through the architecture and neighborhoods at its heart. Francis Als, a Belgian artist with a studio in Mexico City's title historic center, loves to wander, and to record what he sees in photography, videos, slides, drawings and paintings. Walking Distance from the Studio is, in his own words, "everything that I saw, heard, did or undid, understood or misunderstood, within a perimeter of ten blocks around my studio in the centro historico." Through all of this, Als remains an outsider and foreigner--his detachment lets him see and relay everyday things in new, poetic and often surprising ways.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Artwork by Francis Als.
In 2004, the highest endowed all-European art prize, blueOrange, was awarded to Francis Alÿs for his newest sound-image projection, Blue Orange 2004--which focused on the phenomenon of time. Also documented here are the artist's recent works, among them 90 small oil paintings on wood entitled Le Temps du Sommeil. Als works in various media such as performance, drawing, photo sequences, video as well as figurative painting.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.5 x 8.5 in. / 83 pgs / 75 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 135
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883758664SDNR30 List Price: $22.00 CDN $25.00
Published by Turner. Edited by Cuauhtémoc Medina. Essays by Lynne Cooke, Susan Buck-Morss, Gustavo Buntinx, Lucy Lippard, Gerardo Mosquera and Corinne Diserens.
As essayist Cuauhtémoc Medina puts it, “A desperate situation requires an absurd solution.” On April 11, 2002, 500 volunteers (mostly students from the University of Lima) were supplied with shovels and asked to form a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune in Ventanilla, an area outside of Lima. This human comb moved the 1600-foot-long sand dune about four inches from its original position. When Faith Can Move Mountains attempts to translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place. Instead of following the classic model of an artist or exhibition catalogue, this book focuses on the conjunction between the social and historical conditions that the work appropriated, and the metaphoric analysis that the intervention put in motion. Through images (such as photos of the event and drawings for the project) and text (including letters and documents of the intervention) this publication, reminiscent of a science book, narrates the facts and concepts of the work.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essay by Annelie Lütgens. Interview by Corinne Diserens. Preface by Gijs van Tuyl.
The ephemeral--the temporary, fleeting character of life--is a central principle in the art of Francis Als, the Belgian-born artist who currently resides in Mexico. He conceives his works in his own immediate surroundings--on walks through the streets of Mexico City. Working in the traditions of Fluxus and the Situationalists, he is captivated by such images as a wind-blown plastic bag, or sleeping homeless peoples, or the wandering shadow of a flag pole on the Plaza Major. Als's explorations of public space and social conditions in Mexico City are the primary focus of this lavisly illustrated publication that features the artist's Ambulantes (1992-2002), a slide series devoted to the itinerant street merchants of the Mexican megacity. The book also offers a current survey of his subversive, often politically-motivated work.
Published by Parkett. Artwork by Francis Als, Isa Genzken, Anish Kapoor.
For Parkett No. 69, the featured collaboration artists are Belgian conceptual artist Francis Alÿs, German sculptor and mixed-media artist Isa Genzken, and the Indian-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor. Authors include Saul Anton, Robert Storr, and Kitty Scott on Als; Pamela Lee and Jörg Heiser on Genzken, and an interview with Genzken by Michael Krajewski; and Norman Bryson, Marina Warner and Kurt Forster on Kapoor. Other features include Philip Kaiser on Amelie von Wulffen, Stuart Comer on Swetlana Heger and a special Parkett Inquiry on consensus in contemporary art world titled “The Economy of Attention.” The twentieth-anniversary issue, Parkett No. 70, will be published in summer 2004, with special collaborations and projects to be announced.
Published by Turner. Artwork by Francis Als. Edited by Catherine Lampert. Text by D. H. Lawrence, Plato.
This unique volume side-steps the performance work for which Francis Alÿs is most recently recognized, presenting instead his recent paintings and drawings. Over 30 beautiful, encaustic-layered canvases illustrate passages from D.H. Lawrence, Plato, and other great writers, and, in a fluid exchange, are likewise illuminated by them. Als entered the art field by accident, through what he calls “a coincidence of geographical, personal and legal matters [that] resulted in indefinite vacations which, through a mixture of boredom, curiosity and vanity, led to my present profession.” A compulsive wanderer, his personal explorations of the cities in which he finds himself have formed the basis for an eclectic body of work that has involved the varied mediums of documentary film and photography, video, painting and performance, each put to work in a way that reflects specific social and economic conditions in a highly individual style. A close observer and occasional manipulator of the quirks of everyday life, Alÿs responds to fleeting and contingent circumstances from the viewpoint of a passerby who is both involved and separate.
Francis Alÿs: As Long as I’m Walking
Francis Alÿs: Children’s Games
Francis Alÿs: In a Given Situation
Francis Alÿs: Postcards
Francis Alÿs: Le Temps du Sommeil
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception
Francis Alÿs: The Historic Center of Mexico City
Francis Alÿs: Blue Orange 2004
Francis Alÿs: When Faith Can Move Mountains
Francis Alÿs: Walking Distance From The Studio
Parkett No. 69 Francis Alys, Isa Genzken, Anish Kapoor
Francis Alÿs: The Prophet and the Fly