Children’s Games presented at MOMENTA Biennale de l’image: The Life of Things

September 5–October 13, 2019 
 
MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image’s 16th edition, titled The Life of Things, encompasses the works of thirty-nine artists from twenty different countries. Through thirteen exhibitions, artists will explore the issues of (over) consumption that characterize contemporary life. For this edition of the biennale curator, María Wills Londoño, in collaboration with Audrey Genois and Maude Johnson, will examine the excessive production that redefines the limits of the object through four thematic components: Cultural Objects and Material Culture, Thingified Beings or Humanized Objects, The Absurd as Counter-Narrative of the Object, and Still Life in an Age of Environmental Crisis. 
 
In the series, Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), Francis Alÿs presents scenes of children at play, with each work taking place in a different city around the world. Composed of nearly twenty videos, this inventory of childhood activities offers an intimate yet political view of the universal and unifying nature of games in culture. Captured images show how children turn simple, ordinary things—chairs, coins, sand, stones—into the raw material for unlikely and fantastical universes. Transformed by imagination and a fraternal spirit that is both implicit and spontaneous, these objects lose their usual prosaicness to find new symbolic potential. With each gesture, the children reinvent the world, the tensions that organize it, and the converging forces that travel through it. 
 
Exhibition catalogue 
 
Learn more at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.