Francis Alÿs, Ricochets, 2024, Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, installation view
2025. Francis Alÿs
It’s hard to stay hopeful these days, in the face of ever-increasing inequality, scarcity, and war. Thankfully, with his exhibition “Ricochets,” Francis Alÿs presented an antidote to pessimism. The exhibition, organized by Florence Ostende, focused on “Children’s Games,” 1999–, a series of dozens of films made in locations around the world—among them Belgium, Cuba, Hong Kong, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, and Nepal—that together underline transnational connections that today feel all the more poignant in the face of the rising tide of anti-immigration policies. The show presented thirty films from this series, along with nineteen small-scale oil paintings from between 1990 and 2024 and a substantial research archive on the history of children’s games.
By focusing on repetitive and seemingly futile actions—or even analyzing kids’ play with investigative seriousness—Alÿs questions conventional notions of time, utility, productivity, and the role of the artist. So we remember him pushing a trunk-size ice block through the streets of Mexico City until it fully melts in the renowned Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing), 1997, though that film is not in the show. This action resonates with the idea of “dead time,” as articulated by Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian filmmaker and poet often cited by Alÿs: time in which nothing is accomplished or produced. Children’s Game #2: Ricochets, 2007, for instance, shows kids in Morocco skipping stones in the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar with unceasing and unpretentious dexterity. Both films, in different contexts, present simple and enduring actions with a dense poetic charge.
Children’s Game #10: Papalote, 2011, shows a kite being flown in Afghanistan, a free act of play banned under the Taliban regime. In 2023, Alÿs and his team bravely recorded children’s games in Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine, amid the ongoing Russian invasion. In these videos, the kids’ play reflects the unfolding traumatic events—sometimes even mimicking them, as in Children’s Game #39: Parol, 2023, whose subtitle means password in Ukrainian. In this piece, three kids with military uniforms and handmade toy rifles mimic an army checkpoint and inspect cars as if helping to secure the country from another Russian infiltration. Play, Alÿs reminds us, is a vital resource in the face of the inexplicable character of sociopolitical tragedy.
Rarely do shows fit so well in their exhibition spaces: The ample rooms, corridors, and staircases at Serralves, in low light, dignified each of Alÿs’s works—engendering an effect so different from the previous iteration of the exhibition a few months earlier at the Barbican Centre in London, which suffered from awkward lighting and installation choices. Here in Porto, a long corridor that would normally pose challenges to a curator beautifully displayed the artist’s impressive archival research on children’s games worldwide and their cross-cultural origins.
Eschewing hermetic intellectualism in favor of spontaneity and engagement, Alÿs seeks to transform audiences, both adults and children, into active participants. The first two rooms displayed videos as large projections on hanging panels, placed at odd angles like a hide-and-seek labyrinth. I saw visitors, inspired by the films, lying in front of the projections or gleefully sliding around on the rolling stools scattered throughout the room. A “playroom” asks viewers to create shadow shapes with their hands on a wall with light projected onto it. This call for participation—emphasized by taking children as protagonists—mirrors the social practices captured in the videos: communal acts that strengthen human bonds in times of crisis.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 8, April 2025
By focusing on repetitive and seemingly futile actions—or even analyzing kids’ play with investigative seriousness—Alÿs questions conventional notions of time, utility, productivity, and the role of the artist. So we remember him pushing a trunk-size ice block through the streets of Mexico City until it fully melts in the renowned Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing), 1997, though that film is not in the show. This action resonates with the idea of “dead time,” as articulated by Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian filmmaker and poet often cited by Alÿs: time in which nothing is accomplished or produced. Children’s Game #2: Ricochets, 2007, for instance, shows kids in Morocco skipping stones in the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar with unceasing and unpretentious dexterity. Both films, in different contexts, present simple and enduring actions with a dense poetic charge.
Children’s Game #10: Papalote, 2011, shows a kite being flown in Afghanistan, a free act of play banned under the Taliban regime. In 2023, Alÿs and his team bravely recorded children’s games in Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine, amid the ongoing Russian invasion. In these videos, the kids’ play reflects the unfolding traumatic events—sometimes even mimicking them, as in Children’s Game #39: Parol, 2023, whose subtitle means password in Ukrainian. In this piece, three kids with military uniforms and handmade toy rifles mimic an army checkpoint and inspect cars as if helping to secure the country from another Russian infiltration. Play, Alÿs reminds us, is a vital resource in the face of the inexplicable character of sociopolitical tragedy.
Rarely do shows fit so well in their exhibition spaces: The ample rooms, corridors, and staircases at Serralves, in low light, dignified each of Alÿs’s works—engendering an effect so different from the previous iteration of the exhibition a few months earlier at the Barbican Centre in London, which suffered from awkward lighting and installation choices. Here in Porto, a long corridor that would normally pose challenges to a curator beautifully displayed the artist’s impressive archival research on children’s games worldwide and their cross-cultural origins.
Eschewing hermetic intellectualism in favor of spontaneity and engagement, Alÿs seeks to transform audiences, both adults and children, into active participants. The first two rooms displayed videos as large projections on hanging panels, placed at odd angles like a hide-and-seek labyrinth. I saw visitors, inspired by the films, lying in front of the projections or gleefully sliding around on the rolling stools scattered throughout the room. A “playroom” asks viewers to create shadow shapes with their hands on a wall with light projected onto it. This call for participation—emphasized by taking children as protagonists—mirrors the social practices captured in the videos: communal acts that strengthen human bonds in times of crisis.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 8, April 2025
Francis Alÿs, Children’s Games #2: Ricochets (still), 2007, Tangier, Morocco, video, color, sound, 4’43”
Francis Alÿs, Children’s Games #10: Papalote (still), 2011, Balkh, Afghanistan, video, color, sound, 4’13”
Francis Alÿs, Children’s Games #39: Parol (still), 2023, Kharkiv, Ukraine, video, color, sound, 8’02”