Francis Alÿs Movies

The Nightwatch documents an action realised by Alÿs in 2004 in which he released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the...

For this work Alÿs purchased a gun in Mexico City then walked through the city streets with the weapon in his hand. After eleven minutes he was...

The props in this game are wooden sticks or branches shaped like guns. Two kids pretend to fire at each other, making elaborate and highly varied...

A piñata is a papier-mâché figure stuffed with sweets. Common at birthdays in urban patios, here we find it in a field, where a...

For the last decade Alÿs has made repeated trips to the dusty highlands south of Mexico City to chase the tornadoes that frequently occur in...

Over the city of Lubumbashi looms the mampala or slag heap of the Étoile du Congo cobalt mine, its lower slopes today sifted by the...

Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are...

Lamma Island, Hong Kong, 2020.

The most basic sense of fun improvises on chance gifts of the environment. Snow-fun is too immediate to need rules, either. One game suggests...

A 10-year-old boy in a pink salwar kameez stands near a dune-coloured wall under a powder-blue sky. He frowns and gesticulates, conversing in stops...

A traditional animation, hand-drawn in 500+ frames (which are also on display as part of the installation). The animation consists solely of a shoe...

Though mosquitoes have almost as many sensory auditory cells as we do, their hearing is for the sole purpose of finding a mate. Individual males...

Kisolo is one of a thousand variants of the global Ur-game, Mancala, a “sowing” game sometimes still played with seeds even when using a...

Girls and boys, together for once, hunt through lush grass and undergrowth, on the lookout for well-camouflaged grasshoppers. When one is found its...

With all the charm of flick soccer, Subbuteo, pinball, and other miniature passions, this is played on a small circle of stubby broken-off sticks...

Reminiscent of male football tricks where a ball is juggled frontally off the knee or foot, Chunggi, popular among Nepalese girls, appears a lot more...

Why do all the bottle tops start the same way up, grouped together, if there are two teams? When is the ball launched with a plank and when by hand?...

Many of us played this as kids, spinning on the spot until collapsing. In a group there’s a competitive element, each tries to be the last one...

Francis Alÿs has his own drawing painted by several different semi-professional painters.

Neither indoors nor out, but on the doorstep, where you might play a quick game while waiting for someone. Girl and boy pile up candy wrappers, face...