Francis Alÿs: The Gibraltar Projects

The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River consists of paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos, notes, and ephemeral materials. With this body of work, Alÿs examines geographical and philosophical notions of borders as well as larger issues concerning freedom of movement.

The body of work on view in New York relates to a public action that took place simultaneously in between Tangier, Morocco, and Tarifa, Spain, cities facing each other across the Strait of Gibraltar. 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 not only continents but also cultures, the two lines of children waded into the lapping waves, trying to move toward each other, holding their boats up to the horizon line, while the tide relentlessly pulled them back to the shore, in an effort to answer the question posed by Alÿs: “Will the two lines meet in the chimera of the horizon?”

Made on site as well as in the studio, the paintings and drawings allow the artist to experiment with similar ideas and themes in a more solitary and introspective way. Throughout his practice, Alÿs has utilized a combination of abstract and realist motifs in his paintings in order to address the inherent difficulty of representing complex concepts directly.

In early 2006, Alÿs 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, Alÿs pivoted his concept to the Strait of Gibraltar, a mythological site of passage that would occupy his thoughts for many years to come.

Alÿs’s work has explored themes of sociopolitical conflict in border regions for more than twenty-five years, asserting that art is by necessity linked to politics in these areas. He has been exhibiting The Gibraltar Projects: Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River since 2009, improving, expanding, and changing each presentation over the years, bringing its themes and ideas to global audiences.

The presentation in New York marks the culmination and final version of this decades-long projects. It follows exhibitions at institutional venues across the world, in cities including Buenos Aires, Havana, Hong Kong, Marrakech, Mexico City, Milan, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington, DC.