Francis Alÿs Movies

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...

Stark though it is, the roof terrace with its low ochre-red wall and washed turquoise abstract seems the nearest thing to a garden among the...

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...

Why do all the bottle tops start the same way up, grouped together, if there are two teams? When is the ball launched with a plank and when by hand?...

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five...

“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...

The props in this game are wooden sticks or branches shaped like guns. Two kids pretend to fire at each other, making elaborate and highly varied...

We see three kids from behind, standing at a set distance from a peeling, whitewashed wall. The rule is that each player throws a coin against the...

For more than nine hours, Francis Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it completely melts.

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...

The Belgian-born and Mexican-based conceptual artist Francis Alÿs arrived in Iraq in October 2016 to document the displacements caused by the...

64 Coldstream guards walk separately in London entering through different streets and unaware of one another’s route. Upon meeting, they fall...

Close-up on shiny boots, knotted elastic, cobbles. Within the confines of a courtyard two demure little girls are playing a game of confinement,...

This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot. The action consists in flicking a...

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...

On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and...

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

1998, 00:27:43

An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being “frozen,” they are contaminated and activated as...

Politics of Rehearsal (2005) Focuses on the theme of rehearsal, which is so characteristic of Belgian-born, Mexico City-based Francis...