Exhibition - Francis Alys: The Gibraltar Projects

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition by Francis Alys at the gallery’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street locations in New York. Featuring the artist’s acclaimed The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River-an expansive group of works made from 2005 onward that derive from his yearslong efforts to to create the illusion of a bridge spanning the Strait of Gibraltar-it will be Alys’s first solo show in New York in more than ten years. This presentation marks the New York debut of this foundational body of work, which has previously been exhibited at museums across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North America, and South America, and also features several related video works that further demonstrate Alys’s distinctive and poetic approach to art making as a means of creating understanding around some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Alys’s sprawling installation includes a two-channel video projection documenting an action that took place simultaneously on opposite shores of the Strait of Gibraltar-in Tangier, Morocco, and Tarifa, Spain-alongside an important group of paintings, drawings, sculptures, ephemera, and objects that were created and compiled over the course of the event’s production and post-production. Made on-site as well as in the studio, they allow the artist to experiment with similar ideas and themes-ranging from lyrical to contemplative-in a more solitary and introspective way. The phrase Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River refers to a proverb that he heard during the planning phase of the project, which was beset by more logistical issues and holdups than he had encountered with past actions, that resonated both with this experience and his endeavor to create a metaphorical bridge.

Beginning in 1997, and for the ensuing two decades, Alys completed a number of projects that took as their point of departure the inherent sociopolitical conflict in border regions, making works in interstitial locales such as the US-Mexico border, the Green Line in Jerusalem, the Turkish-Armenian border, and the Panama Canal Zone. In early 2006, he had attempted an action titled Bridge/Puente, in which he recruited local fishermen to create the illusion of a continuous chain of boats that would span the open waters separating Havana and Key West, Florida. On the appointed day, however, far more participants materialized in Cuba than in the United States, creating an imbalance and leading to, in the artist’s mind, an unsuccessful resolution of the project.

Having temporarily moved to Europe, Alys pivoted his concept to the Strait of Gibraltar, a mythological site of passage that would occupy his thoughts for many years to come. As he wrote in September 2006, “According to the myth, the Strait of Gibraltar is the place where Hercules separated Europe from Africa and opened the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The Strait seemed like the obvious place to illustrate this contradiction of our times: how can one promote global economy and at the same time limit the global flow of people across continents?” Just shy of nine miles apart, the beaches of Tangier, and Tarifa could be joined by a line of seventy-two cargo ships, Alys estimated, but that would “turn the whole project into an engineering enterprise or a military operation.” He continued, “The difference between a military operation and an artistic gesture lies precisely in the missing fragment of the bridge: the gap that has to be filled by our imagination. That’s what triggers the poetry and makes the artistic operation happen, that’s what opens a moment of suspension.”

Alys spent the next several years plotting out ways to bring the project to fruition, creating in parallel paintings, drawings, and other works as an outlet for his ideas. Disappointed by the response to his project by the fisherman on both sides of the Strait and in response to a rumor that had spread of a floating line of boats connecting the two cities, Alys hit upon the notion of involving children in the action-a decision that would simultaneously reignite his ongoing Children’s Games project. In 2007, he filmed the second work in the series, Ricochets-also on view in the present exhibition-in Tangier, which shows three boys laughing and skipping stones in the Strait of Gibraltar.

Alys was finally able to proceed with the action on August 12, 2008. On this day, a line of local children, each holding a small boat fashioned from a shoe, assembled on the beach in Tarifa, while a counterpart line of children holding shoe-boats gathered on the beach in Tangier. Attempting to bridge cultures as well as continents, the two lines of giggling children waded into the lapping waves, trying to move toward each other, while the tide relentlessly pulled them back to the shore. From the outset, it was clear that the meeting of the two lines was an impossibility; instead, Alys asked the participants on both sides to hold their shoe-boats aloft, as though they were sailing across the horizon, calling on viewers to engage in an act of imagination to make the final connection.

Also on view at David Zwirner New York will be Miradores, a two-channel video that likewise was shot simultaneously in Tarifa and Tangier in 2008. Each screen features footage from a single camera trained on a scenic viewpoint overlooking the Strait in each city, creating a further point of similarity and connection between the two.

Seen together, these interrelated projects are prime examples of Alys’s tenet that the poetic and the political are intimately connected, foregrounding geographical and philosophical notions of borders as well as larger issues concerning freedom of movement and ideas.

Belgian-born Francis Alys (b. 1959) is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media, including documentary film, painting, drawing, performance, two-dimensional animation, and video. Through his practice, Alys consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. The artist himself has described his work as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.”