Image: (L) Hilde Teerlinck, Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation. (R) Francis Alÿs, Peshmerga embed, Mosul, 2016.
Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation Hilde Teerlinck will curate the work of artist Francis Alÿs for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, both representing the region of Flanders within the Belgian Pavilion for the 2022 event.
"What does it mean to make art while cities such as Nimrud and Palmyra are being destroyed? If the logic of ISIS is 'destroy in order to exist' then does this mean that we must create in order to survive? Is art only a means with which to transcend the catastrophe of war?" Francis Alÿs, 4 November 2016
From October to November 2016 Francis Alÿs was embedded as an artist with the Kurdish Army in Mosul, Iraq. Each day he recorded his impressions, notes and sketches in his diary. Since then he has returned seven times to Iraq. Alÿs’ oeuvre is characterised by his integrity and respect for the communities and people depicted within his works, who struggle every day for survival and with whom he feels closely involved. He searches for those chance moments that balance between the banal, everyday life and a deeper consciousness of existence. These experiences are crystallised visually within his work. Alÿs was selected thanks to his unique artistic language, which he uses to communicate his personal experiences not documented in his journals.
Hilde Teerlinck and Francis Alÿs’ project proposal for the Belgian Pavilion within the context of The Venice Bienniale provides the perfect setting to frame the questions that arise within Alÿs’ work and can be seen as a case study that evokes the compelling role of the artist to reveal the invisible and the inexpressible. The presentation will be a tale of hope.
Francis Alÿs was born in 1959 in Antwerp and has lived in Mexico city since 1986. Hilde Teerlinck was born in 1966 in Bruges, and today lives and works in Barcelona where she is the Director of the Han Nefkens Foundation.