1. Installation view, Francis Alÿs - Kids Take Over, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2025, Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent Quack © Francis Alÿs
Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over
The exhibition Francis Alÿs – Kids Take Over at the Museum Ludwig presents a comprehensive view of the Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist’s recent work which focused on children's games around the world. Following his receipt of the 2023 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, the museum collaborated closely with Alÿs to develop this large-scale presentation, which centers on his long-term video project “Children’s Games” and includes smaller sections dedicated to his paintings, drawings, and a collaborative curatorial experiment with children a school from Cologne.
The show focuses on how children, through play, engage with their immediate environments, rural and urban, peaceful and conflict-ridden, offering insights into cultural habits, material conditions, and strategies of adaptation. The exhibition combines video, drawing, and participatory elements to form a coherent, accessible, and socially engaged narrative around childhood, creativity, and resilience.
Video works: Children's Games
2. Francis Alÿs, Children's Game #12 Musical Chairs, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2012, 5:05 min. In collaboration with Elena Pardo and Félix Blume © Francis Alÿs
At the core of the exhibition is Alÿs’s ongoing “Children’s Games” series, a collection of short, observational videos filmed in over twenty countries since 1999. Rather than analyzing each video individually, the exhibition presents them as a dense and diverse visual archive. They are displayed on multiple screens throughout the space, forming a dynamic and immersive installation. Viewers can walk among them, compare games, and note recurring gestures, materials, and attitudes.
The films are usually static or minimally edited, shot with natural light and ambient sound. They document games played by children in streets, alleys, beaches, courtyards, playgrounds, and sometimes inside homes. The diversity of locations, ranging from Havana, Kathmandu, and Paris to Lubumbashi, Kharkiv, and Cologne, demonstrates the global scope of the project and highlights regional variations in play.
Despite the wide geographical span, many of the games share common features: repetition, physical coordination, and collective rules. Rope jumping, leapfrog, rolling tires, hand clapping, spinning, and running form recurring motifs. What distinguishes the games is how they reflect local culture, available materials, and social conditions.
In several cases, games are deeply shaped by the surrounding political or economic context. For instance, in areas affected by war or displacement, children play with heightened awareness of their environment. Yet even in these difficult contexts, the tone of the videos remains observational and non-dramatic. Alÿs does not add narration or music, allowing viewers to focus on the children’s interactions and the ambient life around them.
Across the series, the artist pays attention to both the physical choreography of play and its underlying social structure: who participates, who leads, how rules emerge, and how cooperation or competition unfolds. In many games, girls and boys play separately; in others, mixed-gender participation appears. Some games are invented on the spot, others are clearly passed down through generations.
The series does not aim to catalogue “traditional” games for their own sake. Instead, Alÿs treats play as a lens to observe social dynamics, creativity, and adaptation. The repetitive, rule-based nature of these games often mirrors larger systems, economic, educational, familial but in a condensed and performative format.
The installation includes a new addition made with children from Cologne, who played a game called “Shadow Tag,” where the aim is to step on another child’s shadow rather than their body. This new video ties the project directly to the local community and demonstrates its continued relevance and growth.
3. Francis Alÿs, Shariya Refugee Camp, Iraq, 2016, Oil on canvas, 13,3 x 18,3 x 1,6 cm, © Francis Alÿs, Courtesy of the artist, Peter Kilchmann, Jan Mot & David Zwirner Galleries
In two small rooms within the exhibition, Alÿs’s paintings and drawings are presented. These works are quieter and more intimate, often serving as preparatory sketches or parallel explorations of themes found in the videos.
The drawings, some of which were recently acquired by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst, feature children mid-motion, isolated gestures, or abstracted sequences of game steps. They are rendered with economy and precision, sometimes bordering on schematic diagrams, other times showing more expressive, spontaneous lines.
His paintings are similarly small in scale and focused in subject matter. Painted on wood panels, they often depict minimal scenes, a child, a toy, a shadow. They are not illustrations of the videos but rather meditative reflections on the act of play, offering a more introspective counterpoint to the collective energy seen in the films.
Children as curators: "Kids Take Over"
4. Installation view, Francis Alÿs - Kids Take Over, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2025, Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent, Quack, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Milk Carrier in the Alps, um 1919/20; August Macke, In the garden (Elisabeth with Walterchen and Wolf), 1912; Pablo Picasso, Brasserie à Montmartre, 1901, © Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025; Georg Schrimpf, Pig Farmer, 1923; Henri Matisse, June fille assise, um 1909; Erich Heckel, Paolo Bedini-Taffani, 1928, © Estate Erich Heckel, Hemmenhofen; Natalja Gontscharowa, Orange Seller, 1916, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
One distinctive section of the exhibition is the result of a curatorial experiment: fifty children from Cologne were invited to select works from the Museum Ludwig's collection and create their own display. Their choices were informed by personal preferences, curiosity, and imagination rather than academic or historical logic.
This initiative reflects the broader spirit of the exhibition, centering children's perspectives and giving them agency in cultural spaces. The display is presented alongside the artist's work, further blurring the boundary between institutional authority and everyday creativity. It reinforces the idea that museums are not only spaces of education but also of participation and play.
Biography
Francis Alÿs was born in 1959 in Antwerp, Belgium. He trained as an architect in Tournai and Venice before relocating to Mexico City in the 1980s. There, he shifted his practice toward visual art, working across painting, drawing, performance, and video.
His early projects often involved simple actions carried out in public space, walking, pushing, dragging, marking territory, as a way of exploring urban dynamics and political tensions. Notable works include “Paradox of Praxis I” (1997), where he pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, and “The Green Line” (2004), where he walked along the armistice line in Jerusalem leaving a trail of green paint.
The “Children’s Games” series, begun in 1999 and ongoing, marks one of the most sustained strands of his practice and has become central to his international recognition.
He lives and works in Mexico City.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Museum Ludwig
Date: 12.4.2025 – 3.8.2025
Curators: Rita Kersting and Santi Grunewald
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Museum Ludwig
Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Köln
Phone: 0221 221 26165
Mail: infomuseum-ludwig.de