64 Coldstream guards walk separately in London entering through different streets and unaware of one another’s route. Upon meeting, they fall into step and match together, looking or more guards to join up with.
In August 2017, during the final phase of the Fatah (Conquest) Operation, the Iraqi Army pushed Islamic State combatants back from the east bank of the Tigris River in Mosul. With the support of Baghdad’s Ruya Foundation, Francis Alÿs had been working with the inhabitants of the border region...
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 into Ani. Yet, can't we do better than silence?
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. The player tosses a stone into the grid and starts hopping up one side of it to where the stone lies, careful to land only once in each square or...
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 clandestins, lithium hunters who risk their lives to feed our global battery market. The film rests on dramatic contrasts – tiny bright figures against the expanse...
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 and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you don’t see his kite at first, and the string is so fine you can’t see that...
Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are only an orange apart. It involves embraces, though not loving so much as keeping the partner in tension. Pacifying their natural energy with an eerie,...
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 another. First a chaotic battle sequence, with snowballers spied on from behind tree trunks, a little hill to be conquered; then everyone unites to slide...
High above the city that shimmers like a distant sea, a boy kicks a plastic bottle half full of liquid up a steep shanty road of light and dark. A norteño song plays somewhere. A truck passes. The challenge is to get to the top of the hill by kicking the bottle steadily upwards, intercepting it as...
For an indeterminate period of time, the magnetized metal collector takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds up a coat mad of any metallic residue lying in its path. This process goes on until the collector is completely covered by its trophies.
One of Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the artist’s nocturnal perambulations through Juárez as he kicks a ball of fire along the city’s desolate streets. Transcending metaphor, the eerie mobile...
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 arrested by the police. The following day he repeated the action, this time in cooperation with the police. By presenting a record of this dramatic action...
