Francis Alÿs' Playground Takeover at Barbican

Children come out to play this summer at the Barbican Centre. Not just young Londonites running around the art complex’s sun-trapped courtyard, but across footage inside, where Francis Alÿs’ major new exhibition Ricochets (27 June–1 September 2024) transforms the Barbican Art Gallery into a cinematic playground.

The Mexico-based artist has spent the past two decades travelling the world filming children at play, culminating in his critically acclaimed series ‘Children’s Games’ (1999–present). More than 40 of these games are on view inside the brutalist exhibition space, screened across a mesmerising multi-screen installation.

Visitors are taken to Mexico City where children try their luck at Rock Paper Scissors. Hong Kong‘s skyscrapers frame a group of young girls grappling with a jump rope. On an opposing screen, the tent city of Sharya refugee camp in Iraq hosts a crowd of children around a hopscotch etched into the arid ground. A game of Wolf and Lamb—a variation of the tag-based British Bulldog—entertains a team of youngsters in Afghanistan.

Standing in Barbican’s hollowed-out exhibition space, you feel you’re in a playground; it’s loud, sometimes grating, but it is this precise chaos that we’re so used to in our rapidly urbanised worlds. Alÿs’ training as both an architect and urbanist in Belgium and Italy drove him to explore the civic role of the urban environment when he later became a visual artist. That, and the rapid urbanisation of Mexico City—the capital he has called home since 1986—which has pushed community-based activities out, and digital entertainment in.

The beautifully filmed reels are in dialogue with the artist’s miniature oil-on-canvas paintings lining the institution’s pebbledash walls—a shining example of how bigger is not always better. Crumbling memorials to lost cities in Ukraine rendered on a palm-sized canvas hang next to a rendering of a car ablaze under a footbridge in Ciudad Juarez. Another painting takes viewers back to Sharya where two boys crouch over a dice game; an explanation only realised by the location and date exquisitely scrawled across the bottom of each painting.

Main image: Francis Alÿs, Children's Game #40: Chivichanas, La Habana, Cuba (2023). In collaboration Julien Devaux and Félix Blume.