Since I was not at this year’s Documenta, I saw only yesterday REEL/ UNREEL by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi. I saw the film at home in Amsterdam on a computerscreen via youtube and it hit me.

An Afghanistan boy is playing the classic children’s game ‘wheel and stick’ by using a film reel. The film unwinds and meanders through the dusty and narrow streets of Kabul. Another boy runs after the film. By playing ‘wheel and stick’ as well, he rewind the film on his reel.  As the film rolls around the streets you get an intriguing look in daily life in Kabul. The title of the film not only refers to the film reel but also to the real/unreal image of Afghanistan conveyed by Western media.  An image which tends to focus on military activities and forget to picture how people live their lives.

I tried to figure out why the film made a big impression on me. I am not ready yet. I think it is because of its simplicity, repetitiveness and its power as poetical metaphor. But also the statement at the end of the film impresses.

“On the 5th of september 2001, the taliban confiscated thousands of reels of film from the Afghan Film Archive and burned them on the outskirts of Kabul. People says the fire lated 15 days. But the Taliban didn’t know they were mostly given film print copies, which can be replaced and not the original negatives, wich cannot”

Alÿs choice to do a film in Kabul is even more justified by this statement. He also made a series of paintings. The press release of David Zwirner Gallery (film and paintings are from 10 January 2013 to be seen) says the following:

“While the video offers an alternative to the habitual mainstream media coverage of Kabul, a series of accompanying paintings by Alÿs reminds us of the difficulty of representing the daily reality of war through any medium. Deceptively looking like abstract geometric paintings, these works show a repertoire of color bar combinations that the artist came across between 2010 and 2012, the period during which he was scouting, preparing, filming, and editing the video in Afghanistan. Used by video engineers as test patterns in between televised programming, color bars are electronically produced to correct chrominance and luminance on TV screens. Alÿs’s painted versions, thus, are bound to fail as illustrations. Yet more so than challenging the issue of medium specificity, they reflect the artist’s impossibility of converting his experiences in Afghanistan into images.”

This reminds me of The Day Nobody Died (2008) by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin. Although there are a lot of differences between the works -Broomberg & Chanarin focus much more on the military action, Alÿs on how everyday life goes on – the similarity lies in the fact that both look for other ways to picture Afghanistan,  intelligent ways to overcome clichés.

You can see REEL / UNREEL and all other films by Francis Alÿs on his website

Here you can read more about Broomberg & Chanarins The Day Nobody Died.

Here you can see their film.

Here you can see their installation shots.

25/11/2012