Francis Alÿs Movies

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...

Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins. The players...

Outside a stark tent city, this version of the game involves a grid of squares, two across by six long, marked by lines gouged into the arid ground....

2005, 00:03:07

A group of children hold hands in a circle. The child in the middle plays the lamb, the one outside is the wolf. The wolf tries to catch the lamb by...

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...

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...

"Mixing water from the Red Sea with water from the Black Sea". Trabzon, Turkey-Aqaba, Jordan, 2010.

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...

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

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...

First we drive past harrowing scenes of missile and bullet damage, into an area that’s still intact. At a crossroads not far from the...

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?...

On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and...

During the 5th Havana Biennial, artist Francis Alys put on his magnetic shoes and took daily walks through the streets of the city, collecting scraps...

The castle must be positioned just far enough from the sea to be completed before the tide reaches it. As the moat is dug by busy spades, the vacated...

The cameras follow a reel of film as it unrolls through the old part of Kabul—pushed by two children, uphill and downhill, like a hoop.

For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.