FRANCIS ALŸS

In the series Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), Francis Alÿs presents scenes of children at play around the world. Composed of nearly twenty videos, this inventory of childhood activities offers an intimate yet political view of the universal and unifying nature of games. Captured images show how children turn simple, ordinary things—chairs, coins, sand, stones—into the raw material for unlikely and fantastical universes. Transformed by imagination and a fraternal spirit that is both tacit and spontaneous, these objects lose their usual prosaicness to find new symbolic potential. With each gesture, the children reinvent the world, the tensions that organize it, and the converging forces that travel through it.