Francis Alÿs: Border Barriers Typology

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Rämistrasse, Zurich

The politically complex dimension of the subject of Border BarriersTypology is translated in Alÿs' work into a simple straightforwardness that finds its formal equivalent in the presentation in the exhibition space: at eye level, the paintings positioned evenly on the wall form a calm line of monochrome, earthy brown tones that stretches across all three rooms on the upper floor. Only upon a more closer look, does the viewer become aware of the white, delicate brushstrokes found in grids and static beams that draw an individual border fence in the deserted space on each work.

 

Alÿs began the series in 2019, but a large part of the work was created in 2020, when Alÿs was secluded in the rural valley of Tepoztlan, about 75 km south of Mexico City, during the first Corona lockdown. He oriented his work based on his own sketches and archived photographs of various closed borders from around the world, which he merged with his memory of each place. Each fence has neither beginning nor end and reveals itself to be insurmountable and impenetrable, partly through barbed wire and partly through fine-meshed wire patterns. Despite the abstracted landscape, the names of the regions in conflict, such as AFGHANISTAN/ PAKISTAN or ISRAEL/ WESTBANK, are written in capital letters in the lower left and upper right corners, respectively.

 

Borders - be they man-made or appropriated as such by man through their geographical location - play a recurring role in the artist's work. However, the approach to this conflict-laden theme usually takes place through a metaphorical action that is only subtly politically charged, as in works such as The Green Line - Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic, when Alÿs draws a trail of green paint behind him in a two-day action in 2004 to trace the demarcation line that Moshe Dayan marked on a map of Jerusalem in 1948.

 

The paintings in Border Barriers Typology are upfront. In their simple colourfulness, they are reminiscent of the paintings Alÿs presented in the Iraqi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2016, which were created after his nine-day stay on the front line with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces outside Mosul in Iraq. The border fences capture a reality in which people dream of crossing a border and may never manage to do so, although explicit elements of surveillance, such as security towers or laser jammers, remain invisible in Alÿ's paintings. As Catherine Lampert describes it:

 

The Border paintings invite the eye to scan the geometric variations, the parallel lines and ‘X’s, overlapping triangles, constructions ‘in plan’, these depicted as if a chalk-line approximation best matches the crudeness of the concept. Leaning tops on the double rows of poles bend towards each other, other times like a ‘Y’ they salute, or the aligned concrete planks each have an eye/dot at the top. The barriers run-off the lateral sides of the little boards, un-neat slices, and they appear large in relative scale, intimidating. The white flecks and the woven threads of the canvas are like two complementary scripts. If the paintings were to be installed along geographic routes, you could go from the Mediterranean, Syria/Iran via Pakistan/India; India/Bangladesh; Bangladesh/Myanmar, or turn northwards, Pakistan/Afghanistan.

 

Viewed in dim, raking light, these paintings are nearly ‘precious’. The eye picks up evidence of the painted surface having been sanded, and like real earth, some mineral-like particles appear to sparkle.

This mixture of delicacy and ruggedness gives rise to a desire to wrap them singly in cloths and pack all thirty-five in a rucksack. Silently walking, maybe with this bundle over the shoulder. Could they function like a talisman, to subdue dread, to help refugees evade detection, catapult over the fences, be welcomed, be safe, and thrive? (Catherine Lampert, 2021)