Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the GameWIELS, Brussels, Belgium
“Whereas adults are more likely to use speech to process experiences - whereas adults speak -, children play to assimilate the realities they encounter. Their games mimic, mock or defy the rules of the adult society that surrounds them. The act of playing can also help them to cope with traumatic experiences such as those of war by creating a simulacrum of the real and turning the dramatic circumstances around them into a more fictional, ludic world. But the magical thing about a child’s game is that it holds no secrets, “it’s all there is”. We as adults should be faithful to the children we were; remember and trust that moment, the most precious one of our existence.” Francis Alÿs
Following his presentation for the Flemish entry for the Belgian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Alÿs presents this new, more comprehensive version of the exhibition The Nature of the Game, twelve years after the artist's memorable retrospective at WIELS that introduced Belgian audiences to the full scope of his work.
Since 1999, during his many travels, Francis Alÿs has documented children playing in public places. At the Venice Biennale, Alÿs presented a series of filmed children games made during the pandemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, Hong Kong, Mexico and Switzerland, in dialogue with a group of his discreet small-format paintings. For the presentation at WIELS, he completes several new films, including children's games he recently saw in Ukraine. He confronts them with the film installation The Silence of Ani (2015), 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.
