Francis Alÿs: Reel-Unreel

The MADRE – Museo d’Arte contemporanea Donna Regina of Naples hosts a solo exhibition by Francis Alÿs (1959, Antwerp, Belgium) featuring all the works produced by Alÿs in various parts of Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014, related in the exhibition to some of the artist’s most celebrated works.

Produced in 2011 at Documenta, 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, and its performative matrix, and also, finally, by the combination of critical engagement and aesthetic experience.

The title refers to the action presented in the video (two children who “reel and unreel” two spools of film through the streets of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan), and the film itself, which likewise reels on and off the film projector, with an assonance between the terms reel/real and unreel/unreal adopted by the artist to indicate the partial, or simply unreal, knowledge in the West of the cultural, political and socioeconomic reality of contemporary Afghanistan.

Inspired by the classic street game of rolling a hoop or wheel, once common in Europe and still widely found among children in Afghanistan, the act of rolling a hoop (or wheel) is an exercise in dexterity, which consists of keeping it going with a stick for as long as possible without letting it fall.

In Alÿs’ version the hoop is replaced by a reel of film: a group of children, intrigued, follow the reel as it unwinds through the streets of Kabul, across the old town, the bazaar, the quays along the river, the heaps of garbage and the rubble of buildings destroyed by the war, up into the hills that look down on the city, in recent decades the destination of a massive internal migration that has transformed the hillsides around the center into labyrinth of shacks and makeshift homes. The boy unreeling the film traces a path and is immediately contradicted by another boy his own age who follows him at a distance, seeking to rewind the film onto another reel, as in a movie projector.

In this way the whole city of Kabul is transformed into an improvised movie set, and the gesture of playing into the three-dimensional projection of a film, which gets covered in dust and detritus, bearing with it, in the material impression on the film, the multiple memory of a community suspended between disintegration and reconstruction, memory and forgetting, past and future, drama and play. Like the artist’s other works, Reel-Unreel evokes a dichotomy: on the one hand the gesture of unreeling and on the other of reeling which, in the joyful subversion of every urban rule (checkpoints ignored, rules of conduct disregarded), corresponds to the creation of an alternative narrative of the city of Kabul that brings out the contrast between the real image and the unreal one of contemporary Afghanistan, “reeled and unreeled” for the use and consumption of Western media in accordance with the journalistic, political and socio-economic agendas that for centuries, from the outside, have historically influenced our knowledge of this country, never truly understood by the West.

Like all Alÿs’s works, Reel-Unreel also stems from an apparently useless performative action, that shown in the film (a game played by children who briefly take possession of the streets of their city). The video has given rise to a number of other works – animations, paintings, drawings, collages, postcards, documents and a series of “ephemeral objects”, all on display in the rooms on the second floor of the MADRE – which constitute what the artist calls the “Afghan Projects”, which are configured together as a storyboard or archive, whose documentary and narrative structure recalls a travelogue made up of images and annotations, a board on which are posted thoughts and memories, ideas and comments, encounters and suggestions, interpretations and projects.

until September 22, 2014
Francis Alÿs
Reel-Unreel (Afghan Projects, 2010-14)
curated by Andrea Viliani, Eugenio Viola
in collaboration with Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw
MADRE
Via Settembrini 79, Napoli