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Francis Alÿs
Children's Games

MUAC, Mexico city, Mexico, 11 February - 17 September 2023

Francis Alÿs: Children's Games

MUAC, Mexico city, Mexico

Past gallery exhibitions exhibition
  • Overview
  • Installation Views
  • Publications
Overview
Francis Alÿs, Children's GamesMUAC, Mexico city, Mexico

Since 1999, Alÿs has been producing videos that document the games that children play on the street and in courtyards around the world. Children’s Games is an ongoing archive of urban practices that modernization has been banishing from everyday life as the concept of public space is distorted by the domination of motor vehicles and free time by electronic diversions.

The children’s games that Alÿs captures constitute a threatened underground culture that brought together generations and crossed borders, and which are extremely interesting due to their conceptual implications. Their rules, images and references project a variety of concepts on time and the world and suggest an ancient, potent substrate underlying our shared experience, which is another reason why we should be concerned with their imminent disappearance.

Many of these videos have been shot in relatively economically underdeveloped regions of the world, where the strength of tradition and community have allowed the shared life of a childhood on the street to survive. While they frequently have a direct value as ethnographic documentation, they also metaphorically record transformations and conflicts in contemporary societies. But both in the mysterious way in which certain games are played practically identically in extremely different societies, as well as in their human value, they also become a signifying mechanism that unites a variety of cultures and ways of life.

A large number of these games, if not the entire series Children’s Games by Francis Alÿs, give off a utopian aura. They express and document forms of self-regulated sociability, in which children establish a diagram of their social relationships on a competitive basis without recurring to legislation or force.
 
These political implications are among Alÿs’s primary motivations for producing his work. For all these reasons, Children’s Games is a project that greatly exceeds the singularity of an artist: it presents itself as an essential archive for humanity’s future.

Artist: Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959; he lives and works in Mexico City)
Curatorship: Cuauhtémoc Medina y Virginia Roy
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Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
  • Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
  • Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
  • Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
  • Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
  • Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Installation view, Francis Alÿs: Children's Games, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city, Mexico, 2023
Publications
  • Francis Alÿs

    Francis Alÿs

    Children’s Games, 2023 Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lorna Scott Fox

    MUAC, Mexico City

    Read more

Related artist

  • Francis Alÿs

    Francis Alÿs

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Phone: +41 44 278 10 11

info@peterkilchmann.com

 

Viewing Hours
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Saturday, 11 am - 5 pm, and by appointment

 

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