Francis Alÿs Movies

Che Ling means “pull bell sound”. This ancient Chinese juggling is a form of yoyo, once popular in Europe as “diabolo”. Two...

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

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 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...

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...

Children getting into a frightful mess that only parents could sort out: this familiar scenario plays out subversively, for the rescuing...

In order to avoid being tagged, the shadow must run away. Only the body to which the shadow belongs can escape to protect the shadow from the...

In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks...

The Purépecha community has played Uárhukua for 3,500 years. The game symbolises the fight between the old sun – the night...

One of Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the...

Each person’s action affects everybody. This fine principle of teamwork applies even when individuals are pulling in different directions....

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...

The game “Mosquito of Pachacútec” refers to the historical metaphor of how the Inca Empire was challenged in its territorial...

Ordinary bottle tops, once flattened, threaded and tensed for spinning, become as sharp as gladiator swords. It’s edge against thrumming edge...

“After about ten minutes the action comes to an abrupt end when Alÿs unthinkingly follows the bottle into the street and is hit by a...

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...

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 bay is peaceful, framed by low hills in the distance. Three boys stand thigh-deep in the brown water, trousers rolled up. The biggest, on the...

Once upon a time Ani was one of the most important cities of the Middle Ages. People started abandoning the city until all life left and silence fell...

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...