For this new presentation in WIELS which runs until January 7th 2024, he is adding the film installation The Silence of Ani, showing children playing in the ruins of a Turkish city, which he made in 2015 for the 14th Istanbul Biennial.
Since 1999, during his many travels, Alÿs has documented children playing in public places. At the Venice Biennale, he presented a series of filmed children games made during the pandemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, Hong Kong, Mexico, Morocco and Switzerland. In this new presentation, he completes several new films including children's games he recently saw in Ukraine and confronts them with the film installation The Silence of Ani, in which children play hide-and-seek in the ruins of an ancient Armenian city on the edge of present-day Turkey. Using bird calls, the children create the illusion that the city is coming back to life.
Play is a basic natural human need, just like eating and sleeping. As children, we learn it instinctively or through imitating others. Children’s play should be seen as a creative relationship between children and the world they live in, as an activity that can sometimes conceal a socio-political dimension. However, as social interactions increasingly take place online in a virtual world, Alÿs captures this moment of profound transition that our society is undergoing and gathers a memory of children’s games before they disappear. While some of the games relate to the traditions of a specific area, others are more universal. Many of these games can also be found in the 16th-century painting Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a work that made a strong impression on Alÿs when he first saw it as a child. This painting has been linked to an anonymous Flemish poem, published by Jan van Doesborch in Antwerp around 1530, in which humanity as a whole is compared to children absorbed in their foolish games.
Alÿs is fascinated by children’s games, and their occasionally seemingly incoherent rules and logic, including those in conflict zones. Although he has spoken of his inner struggle to represent that which cannot be represented, the apparent absurdity of the artistic act allows him to reintroduce meaning into a situation in which no meaning can be discerned. Similarly, children’s games, which continue regardless of the circumstances, create a framework and a structure (even if it is ephemeral and meaningful only to the children themselves) that is universal.
Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #23: Step on a Crack (film still). Hong Kong, 2020. 5’. In collaboration with Félix Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega. Copyright Francis Alys, Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Jan Mot and David Zwirner Gallery
Observing and documenting human behaviour in urban environments is a constant theme in Alÿs’s work. His films record both cultural traditions and children’s spontaneous and unconstrained actions, in the street, as well as in conflict zones and the turbulence of modern life. Children’s games play an important role in investigating the persistence of patterns of popular social behaviour. They have earned a central place in Alÿs’s practice so that he can use his camera to capture the culture and patterns by which people live, sometimes even in places where they seem least likely to occur.
The exhibition at WIELS is curated by Dirk Snauwaert, artistic director of WIELS and by Hilde Teerlinck, curator of the Belgian Pavilion.
Francis Alÿs, Untitled. Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 2010. Oil on canvas 13 x 18 cm. Copyright Francis Alys, Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Jan Mot and David Zwirner Gallery
About WIELS
As one of Europe’s leading contemporary art institutions, WIELS presents temporary exhibitions by emerging and more established artists from Belgium and abroad. WIELS is a site for creation and dialogue, where art and architecture form the basis for discussions about current events and issues, through the exhibition programme and a host of complementary activities.
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