Alice, Francis

Alice was born in 1959, in Antwerp, in the family of a judge. From 1978 to 1983 He studied architecture at the Architectural Institute in Tournai, and from 1983 to 1986. studied at the Venetian Graduate School of Architecture in urban planning. In 1986 he moved to Mexico City, where he began his career as an artist.

Alice is interested in topics related to the tension between politics and ethics, individual action and mass consciousness. His projects have a bright social character, the artist often turns to the themes of rethinking public space. Many of Alice’s works are pessimistic, he draws the attention of the viewer to the incredible efforts of a modern person, wasted on useless actions, on the constant disappointment in the pursuit of meaning. The artist works in many genres: from painting and drawing, to happening and photography. Some actions of the artist involve photo documentation and fixation in the form of recordings, sketches, videos and animations.

• 2002 - the project “When Faith Moves Mountains”. In the dunes of Lima, the artist lined up 500 volunteers with shovels in a line and asked them to move forward, pouring sand from one side of the dune to the other with each step. A few hours later, the line changed the existing geological landscape of Lima, shifting the dune by several centimeters. ^[6]
• 2014 - a project in the framework of the Manifesto Biennale 10. On the old Lada Kopeyka, Francis Alice, in the company of his brother, made his once frustrated trip from Brussels to St. Petersburg. The finale of the project was an accident in the Large Courtyard of the Winter Palace, where, according to the artist, the fantasies of youth were broken along with the machine. “This is the true story of two people attracted by the Soviet Union. We lived in a bourgeois world. We wanted to see an alternative world. We were not acquainted with him, only abstractly. We had an idealistic view. Thirty years later, I reminded my brother of our journey and offered to go to Petersburg again to get rid of these illusions, from all the illusions of our childhood, ”says artist Francis Alice. ^[7]

Alice's solo exhibitions were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2011), at the Tate Gallery in London, at the Wils Contemporary Art Center in Brussels (both 2010), at the Schaulager Museum in Basel (2006), in Martin -Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2004), in the National Museum of the Center for the Arts of Reina Sofia in Madrid (2002), etc. He participated in many collective exhibitions, such as “Document-13” (2012), Venice Biennale ( 2007, 2001, 1999), Biennale in Sao Paulo (2010, 1998) and the 3rd Biennale of Latin America in Lima (Peru, 2002). ^[eight]

• Francis Alice Official Website
• Manifesto Online Catalog

• Groys B. Politics of poetics. - M .: Ad marginem, 2012 .-- ISBN 978-5-91103-139-8