Francis Alÿs

Overview

Curators: Rita Kersting, Santi Grunewald

The Museum Ludwig presents Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over, a remarkable exhibition in which children are the focus. The internationally acclaimed artist Francis Alÿs has had major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and numerous other museums in cities such as Houston, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Basel. His work was featured at the Venice Biennale in 2022 and in 2023 he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig.

Thirty video works from Alÿs’s ongoing series Children’s Games, showing children from around the world at play, will be presented at the Museum Ludwig in dialogue with a group of paintings by the artist. An outreach project with local Cologne schoolchildren adds a participatory dimension to the exhibition.

Alÿs has turned over part of the exhibition space to fifty children from two local elementary schools in Cologne who have collaborated on a project that forms a special part of the show. These children – from class 3b at the Gemeinschaftsgrundschule in Köln-Lindweiler and class 6a/b at the Adolph Kolping-Hauptschule in Köln-Kalk – aged between eight and thirteen, like those featured in Children’s Games, have designed a play zone and a children’s museum. They have worked on the project for over a year, choosing artworks from the Museum Ludwig’s permanent collection for their own curated museum. This collaboration is an experiment by children for children, allowing them to draw on their own perspectives to engage with paintings, sculptures, and video works and to invite others to do the same.

A new film in the Children’s Games series, made by Alÿs in Cologne with the participation of the local schoolchildren, will premiere in the exhibition in June.

Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over is the largest outreach program the Museum Ludwig has ever undertaken. To encourage as many children as possible to visit the exhibition, over one hundred classes have been invited to visit the show. For many, it will be their first time to a museum, and their travel costs, often an obstacle for potential visitors, will be covered by the institution.

This exhibition will transform the Museum Ludwig into a place where global and local perspectives merge. It invites visitors to discover the power of art and games, appreciate the perspectives of children—the voices of the future—and, through them, experience the museum in a new way.