Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game

The Belgian artist Francis Alys (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. An essay by David MacDougall embeds Alys’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.