Francis Alÿs

With a career spanning four decades, Francis Alÿs has forged a unique and radical practice which embraces multiple media, from painting and drawing to video and photography. Trained as an architect and urbanist in Belgium and Italy, Alÿs moved to Mexico City in 1986. The rapidly shifting urban context and the consequent changes to social dynamics in the late 1980s inspired him to become a visual artist, developing his early public interventions. Working in collaboration with local communities around the world, his lifelong exploration of art as a vehicle for witnessing social and political change emerged from his engagement with cross-cultural contexts from Latin America to North Africa and the Middle East.

For more than twenty years Alÿs has travelled to over 25 countries around the world to document children at play: from ‘musical chairs’ in Mexico, to ‘leapfrog’ in Iraq, and to ‘jump rope’ in Hong Kong. The ever-expanding project of Children’s Games is a record of lived experiences of play and social interactions which are in decline due to rapid urbanization, the omnipresence of cars, the erosion of communities and the use of social media and digital entertainment.