Urban Art! Biennale® 2019
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Meinrad Maria Grewenig, Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte |
| Author(s) | Don Karl, Robert Kaltenhäuser, Frank Krämer, Meinrad Maria Grewenig |
| Design | Glas AG |
| Size | 24 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 240 |
| Illustrations | 300 |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-394-756-336-4 |
The World’s Most Important Exhibition of Urban Art — Presented for the Fifth Time in 2019
Its themes are the city and urban lifestyle, its can-vases walls, doors, or windows, its artists cosmo-politan. Since the turn of the millennium, Urban Art has developed out of the non-commercial, often illegal art forms of graffiti and street art. Although it makes use of the same stylistic means — spraying, tagging, the deliberate inclusion of drips, the use of graffiti scripts, etc. — it transports these as commis-sioned works into the legal space of the museum, gallery, or architecture. The Urban Art Biennial at the World Cultural Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte is the largest international exhibition of its kind. Fifty individual works and twenty-five installations by one hundred artists shed light on the latest developments and positions from Western metropolises, as well as from current hot spots around the globe.
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Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
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The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
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