Francis Alÿs Children’s Game #20: Leapfrog Nerkzlia, Iraq, 2018; 5:53 min; in collaboration with Ivan Boccara, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume

The 59th Venice Biennale opened to the public yesterday curated around the main theme: The Milk of Dreams. Having been to the Biennale it’s quite overwhelming: what to see, focus on, navigating crowds, the various pavilions, satellite exhibitions and different locations, especially if you’re under a tight time schedule. But if I were going this year I’d make a beeline for the Belgium Pavilion and Francis Alÿs’s exhibition The Nature of the Game.

Since 1999 Alÿs, who was born in Antwerp but lives in Mexico, has been documenting children’s games, beginning with Children’s Game #1: Caracoles, showing a young boy kicking a bottle up a steep street, only to let it roll back to him and then kicking it up again. The current exhibition features a video from 2017—as well as more recent works—Children’s Games #19: Haram Soccer, where young boys play a game that is banned in areas controlled by the Islamic State. Alÿs created this video while he was embedded in the Kurdish Army for nine days on the front lines of Mosul, and he had this to say of the experience: “There is something peculiar about the times we live in, and with them, a different expectation of the artist’s role. When the structure of a society collapses, when politicians and media have lost credit and terror invades daily life, society turns toward culture in pursuit of answers.”

Through documenting how kids play from various countries in the world, Alÿs’s poetic and politically incisive work explores how human’s live: adapting to limited resources and adverse conditions, showcasing amazing ingenuity, cultural traditions, cooperation as well as competition, and the simple joy at playing the game, of being alive in the present.