Plinth

Alÿs has spent the last two decades filming children playing in over 15 countries – from imbu (catching mosquitoes) in the Congo to conkers in London, jump rope in Hong Kong, kite flying in Afghanistan, leap frog in Iraq and snail racing in Belgium. At the Barbican, these films play simultaneously on a maze of screens suspended at different heights so that the images overlap and merge. And the woman was right: it is very loud. The films clamour and clash recreating the chaos – and heightened drama – of playgrounds, where rivalries and alliances are formed and broken with fists and outstretched palms, tears and kisses, scuffed knees and grazed elbows. Everything happening all at once, out in the open.

It is a world apart from the closed doors, rigid structures and hierarchies of adulthood – and from the silence and order of most art exhibitions. As such, it comes as no surprise that children are the visitors who seem most at home and when we visit there are several dashing about. My six-month-old son shouts excitedly at the films and later, unbelievably, falls asleep in my arms while a little girl zig-zags madly between the screens in flashing trainers. On the ground floor, a young boy is spinning around on one of the moveable stools with his legs in the air and eyes squeezed shut, oblivious to the fact that he’s partially blocking out ‘the art’ and also mimicking it. Behind him Congolese kids spin faster and faster around on the spot until the loser collapses in their dizziness. By contrast, the adult visitors (myself included) appear adrift, clutching exhibition guides, trying to decide where to stand or to move to next. If we can learn anything from the child visitors, this is it: to surrender totally to the experience, to let the images and sounds wash over you, to see what settles. It sounds simple, but it’s a challenge to the way we are taught to encounter art and inhabit public space.

This is also the crux of play. Time and again, Alÿs documents children completely immersed and transformed; if only for a minute or even a second, they totally inhabit and embody the game. Children’s Game 2: Ricochets, which features three boys skimming stones, shows this most clearly. The biggest boy is the designated skimmer. He is being fed stones from a stockpile inside the middle boy’s t-shirt while the smallest boy looks on laughing. The biggest boy takes one stone, throws it and often without waiting for the previous stone to drop, reaches for the next. The boy’s expression is one of almost grim concentration: in this moment nothing else matters except the act of throwing.

We see similarly intense levels of concentration in Children’s Game 34: Appelsindans in which pairs of children attempt to balance an orange between their heads. The children grip tightly onto each other’s upper arms, their faces pressing and turning in desperate effort to hold the orange beneath the arc of cheekbone, in an eye socket while they shuffle awkwardly around a park. When an orange drops, one pair laughs at their failure, and only then the order of the real world resumes. It is not really a resumption though but a process of small, imperceptible transformation (you could say learning) – each child and their understanding of the world is altered by their participation in the game.

As Alÿs’ films show, games provide an escape from reality as much as they respond to, defy and ape it – and the line between the real and the make-believe is often perilously thin. In the exhibition, we feel this edge before we see it. It’s in the tense rumbling sounds of helicopters and vehicles that cut through the children’s voices, it’s in the darkness of the rooms showing single films and in Alÿs’ spectral animated chalk drawing of swinging feet. It’s in the fast-paced, jolting movements of the camera, in the tiny, illuminated paintings of landscapes that hang between the films and even in the materiality and hang of the screens. All of it amounts to a sense of provisionality that is on the one hand freeing, inviting that less rigidly scripted encounter with space and art that the child visitors access so easily, and on the other, horribly precarious.

Of course, the exhibition arrives at a time when each day more children's lives are turned upside down – and ended – by ongoing conflicts around the world. Children’s Game 39: Parol was filmed in the Ukrainian region of Kharkiv in 2023, a year after Russia invaded. It features three boys dressed in army uniform standing at the edge of a road holding wooden guns and flagging down passing cars. When a car stops they ask the driver for identification, check the trunk and demand a password. The viewer, like the drivers, knows that this is a children’s game and so the sense of danger or threat that might normally be associated with such action is deflated but not entirely erased. It lingers in our awareness of what these boys must have encountered, in what their uniforms and guns represent.

In the upstairs gallery, there is another film in which Ukrainian children stand directly in front of the camera, humming the sound of sirens. Some are serious, almost fierce in their effort to produce a likeness while others stammer and giggle, coy under the artist’s gaze. It’s the only film in which the children are obviously performing for Alÿs, which gives the whole thing a nervous artificiality, but at the end of the film, we’re told that imitating sirens is a part of game played by Ukrainian children that was, like Parol, born out of the war. The full game comprises an air raid (re)enactment, in which the children build shelters out of cardboard boxes and launch paper grenades into the air. That children have learned such actions is heartbreaking, but at the same time, there is hope to be found in their innate, expansive ability to invent in the face of hardship, fear and sorrow.

It is this – the transformative power of the imagination – that Alÿs deems worthy of documentation. A display wrapping around the upper gallery, featuring instances of play depicted in historical artworks and objects drives home the idea that games are cultural artefacts worthy of serious scholarly and artistic attention, but Alÿs’ work goes beyond the archival. An art exhibition, he suggests, can (perhaps should) also be a game that invites us to become active participants, rather than viewers, that encourages us to encounter different ways of being and transports us into other worlds, that dares us to let go of our inhibitions and to move more freely through space.

By Millie Walton

Cover image: Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #22: Jump Rope, Hong Kong, 2020. In collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume