Curated by Marie Muracciole

Francis Alÿs came to Beirut for the first time nine years ago, in December 2008, for a workshop organized by the upstart arts organization 98Weeks. At the time, he and the curator Cuauhtémoc Medina proposed walking the city as an artistic practice in and of itself. The Lebanese capital has changed dramatically since then, and Alÿs’s engagement with conflicts in the wider region—including major projects in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan—has grown substantially. The artist’s first solo exhibition at an institution in the Middle East ups the metaphorical ante from perambulation to tornado chasing. The show centers on three bodies of work: the 2000–10 video Tornado; Knots, a rarely shown 2005 installation of a knotted rope accompanied by three drawings; and a short, as-yet-untitled stop—motion animation, which will be shown with some eight hundred of the drawings used in its making. Travels to the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, June 20–September 9.  

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie