W3. Francis Alÿs’ exhibition

Jaap Guldemond and Marente Blomheuvel’s explanation of Francis Alÿs’ Children’s Games, echoes the information on the exhibition walls. The EYE museum was successful in painting a picture of Alÿs and his practice within the exhibition space, exhibition catalogue and on their website. Although the exhibition space was a simple, monomedia space which allowed the visitor to explore the space freely, the message about who Alÿs is as an artist and filmmaker and why he makes his films is clearly laid out by the museum. When entering the exhibit, the opening wall explains Alÿs’ artistic practice and why he started filming Children’s Games. When visitors go to the EYE museum’s web page for Children’s Games, they can read similar information about the artist’s practice, see video stills and watch the exhibition’s trailer. At the top of the webpage, visitors can also see the Children’s Games campaign image, which is a still Alÿs’ film with a lone boy who plays with a kite. What I find particularly interesting about the choice of this image, and we touched on this in class, is that this image was one of the few videos that depicted a lone player. Most of the games that Alÿs captured were group games, which I found important to capture the joyful exchanges and the love between the children and their united love of the game. It would be more interesting to use a group game image as the campaign image because these videos were most capturing of Alÿs’ humanistic yet playful engagement with the children that he filmed. 
This is when I would like to discuss the online representation of the Francis Alÿs’ Children’s Games exhibit which was on display at MAC Montréal (Musée d’Art Contemporain). An interesting difference here is the campaign image that was chosen. On the MAC Montréal webpage, the still that was chosen was from Sillas (Musical Chairs). I am not sure how the actual exhibition was arranged (although from a few images that I found online it seems that the placement of the screens was similar to that of the EYE), but I believe that this campaign image was a much better fit to the exhibition. The EYE museum chose Sillas as their first video, hitting the viewer with a bright and cheerful first impression; the music and children’s giggles filling the air. In addition to the differing campaign image, the MAC Montréal webpage also provides very little information on the artist and the exhibition leaving more mystery for the potential visitor. I think that between the exploratory exhibition space and the artist/filmmaker’s simple history, this is very successful as it leaves more interpretation and discovery for the viewer and I think that this is something that museums strive for.  

Written by Sofia