Belgium 2022

Title: The Nature of the Game
Commissioner: Visit Flanders
Curator: Hilde Teerlinck
Exhibitor: Francis Alÿs

For the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, the Belgian Pavilion has invited curator Hilde Teerlinck and artist Francis Alÿs to develop an exhibition project. Alÿs’ exhibition “The Nature of the Game” features an unseen selection of films and a series of paintings.

The theme of the exhibition is children’s play, which Alÿs sees as something natural, something that we discover and learn instinctively in our childhood. Like eating and sleeping, playing is an essential human need. It is necessary to take time, to spend time and to lose time in playing. Child’s play is to be understood as a creative relationship with the world in which they are living, revealing a socio-political dimension.

Since 1999 Alÿs travels over the world to film children while playing in public spaces, with an anthropological gaze: the artist observes, investigates and documents human behaviour in urban life.

His films record (in an ethnographical way) both the power of cultural tradition and the relaxed, free and autonomous attitudes of children, even in the most conflicted of situations. The child’s games play an important role in these explorations and have recently taken a more central position in his practice.