Francis Alÿs appeals to memory and celebrates joy at the MUAC

An enchantment to memory, a celebration of joy and a tribute to wish. This is how the exhibition is summarized Children’s Games, 1999-2022, by means of Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959), with which the Contemporary Art University Museum (MUAC) celebrates its 15th anniversary. The pattern is taken into consideration through the ones accountable for that venue one of the maximum importants artistic proposals this year.

The exhibition, open to the public till mid-September, is made from two artwork and 27 of the 33 audiovisual portions in which the artist has documented numerous youngsters’s games played in various areas of the arena wherein monetary crises, the force of Tradition and social groups have made the collective lifestyles of formative years subsist in the public area.

These works are a part of an ambitious ongoing archive of city practices that modernization is banishing from every day existence, because the concept of public area is being disrupted by using the predominance of cars and the hoarding of free time through electronic distractions, noted Cuauhtémoc Medina, leader curator of MUAC.

The exhibition occupies 3 rooms of the museum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and, if whatever influences it, it's miles its sound: a strident and immersive noise that looks like a massive swarm or aviary from which voices, laughter and cries of toddlers of different cultures in full ecstasy of joy, some thing that right now detonates the nostalgia of a few viewers.

Children’s games have always inspired Francis Alÿs. “If you spot a piece just like the collector, which I did inside the early 90s – and which is a part of the MUAC collection – turned into already a pastime of a sport from my adolescence, wherein I pulled a magnet thru the streets or the schoolyard. The video games as according to and its dynamics have always been a very essential reference point in my paintings, as seen in initiatives previous to these films”.

In a excursion of the exhibition, the European artist based in Mexico considers this project to be a part of a new stage in his existence and artistic career, in which he has proposed “to pass the limelight to the next generation, which can be the kids, and retract myself , actually.

That became the cause for this exhibition. Here it's miles a much more documentary, greater ethnological position, like a brand new bankruptcy, a brand new technology of the paintings that I am just starting to develop.

Francis Alÿs stated that the registration of those games responds to the reality that lots of them are in hazard of disappearing inside the face of the loss of the street, the over-care of parents, (the upward push of) social networks and because public area has become more dangerous.

The major motive for this collection is register a second of transition. I am now not judging what's better or worse than what's occurring. Clearly we are living a moment of transition and I thought it critical to record it.

The writer stated the stunning video of a set of youngsters playing football with an imaginary ball in Iraq due to the Islamic State’s ban on that game.

“It became filmed a month earlier than the liberation of Mosul (in 2017). These children, as an act of heroic resistance, invented this sport to keep away from the ban on the ball, that's seen as a Western sport. I know that it is a situation that takes place in different components of the sector: that dimension of the sport as a manner for youngsters to face the fact wherein they locate themselves.

“It is a totally easy manner, as I mentioned within the presentation of the exhibition: adults talk to procedure their feelings and issues; children play. So, that turned into the reaction to the imposition of banning the ball and executing folks that had seen a football match inside the tele a few months before. I felt it was necessary to document that moment.”

The MUAC is located within the University Cultural Center (Insurgentes Sur 3000, Mexico City).