Six months of group workshops culminate in sessions in a shallow pool of oil. Representing the Netherlands, melanie bonajo’s When the body says Yes (2022) explores the use of games to break through taboos surrounding touch and intimacy. For the Surrealists, the unpredictability of improvised play was an escape from the regimented world of industry and warfare: leave reliability to the machines. Frida Kahlo’s contributions were invariably filthy. The women of Surrealism – whose interest in monsters, machines and bodily functions underpins the main exhibition – were partial to cadavre exquis (the drawing game also known as ‘consequences’). As he tested it in front of his assistants in Querceta, Italy, he declared: ‘Art is something to be felt through a child’s buttocks.’įor the grown-ups, play became an unspoken sub-theme at this year’s Biennale. In 1986, Isamu Noguchi installed Slide Mantra – a cylindrical white marble sculpture – in the courtyard of the US pavilion. Other artists interested in play have shown at the Biennale in the past. Rather than publishing a scholarly volume, Alÿs essentially curated an exhibition of creative play and presented it at the world’s most prestigious art event – a radical gesture in itself. Production photograph, taken on location in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, during filming for Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Game #29: La roue (2021). In San Francisco, psychologist and educator Rhoda Kellogg amassed around one million drawings by children (an archive of 8,000 was published in 1967.) Art critic Herbert Read studied them and was fascinated to observe how infants intuitively progressed through similar patterns of mark making. In the UK, between the 1950s and ’90s, folklorists Iona and Peter Opie gathered songs, games and lore in volumes such as Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969). He is not alone in the desire to archive the creative products of childhood. Play is a coping mechanism a learning tool for survival, offering the realm of the imagination as private space or temporary escape.Īlÿs proposes these games as ephemeral cultural artefacts that merit preservation. In 2016, photographer Mark Neville’s project Child’s Play documented children making space for games in extreme environments, including the Shamattawa First Nation in Manitoba, Helmand Province in Afghanistan and Luhansk in East Ukraine. Other artists have explored the instinct to play manifesting in the most forbidding circumstances. La roue was filmed in Lubumbashi the vast black mountain up which the boy pushes his tyre is a waste heap from the Etoile Mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Watching a girl hop and leap as she avoids cracks in the pavement, we also take in the density of buildings and traffic surrounding her in Hong Kong. While some games require basic equipment (a skipping rope, paint to mark racing snails, paper and string for a kite), all evolve as an inventive exploitation of the given environment. There is rope jumping, a game of pandemic-era ‘contagion’ tag and a group humming to summon mosquitoes.Īlÿs’s installation argues for play as a creative response to circumstance. In fact, it forms part of The Nature of the Game (2022) by Francis Alÿs in the Belgian Pavilion: a labyrinth of screens showing children around the world engaged in play. Some may consider this never-ending Sisyphean cycle a useful metaphor for the Biennale itself. It demands extraordinary effort for a brief thrill ride, in which the dutiful expression of pleasure is tempered by dread. He leaps out, without a wobble, then starts the process again. A camera inside the wheel captures his face flickering between glee and terror as he descends at speed, careening and bouncing until the tyre topples. Preview and subscribe here.Ī memorable video at this year’s Venice Biennale – Children’s Game #29: La roue (2021) – shows a boy patiently pushing a tyre up a mountain of dark slag before curling his body inside and pitching himself downhill.
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