The Nature of the Game

​I’m going to be honest.
Almost every time I walk into the Belgium pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I walk away disappointed.
But this year, I not only loved the exhibit, I actually made some extra time to return there, to ensure I ended my Biennale experience with a smile on my face.

Our everyday lives are full of rites, rituals and habits that we carry out unthinkingly.
How many times have you ever stood there trying to work out if you're following in the footsteps of your ancestors or whether the rite you're carrying out is something that you invented? Never, right? Because unless you're an anthropologist, the origin of your behaviour is secondary.
And we'd rather spend more time thinking about ourselves than the patterns in our behaviour.
But we can learn a lot about ourselves by thinking about the way we approach collective behaviour.
And this year, Francis Alÿs gets down to the business of documenting the patterns that can be found in the way people live.
His films don't do this by recording the monotony or the drudgery that marks many peoples' lives. They're not about you catching your subway to the office and eating your lunch at a set hour before making the treck back home.
No, this year, for the Belgian pavillion, he taps into a unifying culture that we have all been part of at some point in our lives.
And by doing so, his films somehow throw up ideas about the invisible rules and traditions that define us, and that mysteriously continue to play out, no matter which part of the globe we're in.
Having travelled across four continents since the late nineties, Alÿs has used some of that time to film children playing children’s games. With The Nature of the Game exhibit, he brings some of this documentation together.
The videos play out in a loop, each randomly distributed across the exhibition space, where no one region or game is favoured over the other.
Instead, there's a cacophony of sound and laughter that comes from all directions, as some of the world's most popular rites play out.
There's some old classics that you'll recognise, as well as some new games that seem to have been born out of the climate of the pandemic.
In bringing them all under one roof, Alÿs has basically reminded us how universal the nature of play is. And how sometimes, play can be arduous or require great courage and discipline... that it has rules that need to be followed, whether they're made up or defined by the rules of gravity.
While exploring all of this, Alÿs has somehow found a way to distill all the joy from play into his work, while also producing some incredibly striking images.
That dual nature of fun and beauty is even more obvious because these works have come out some of the world’s most challenging environments.
The video works are also accompanied by a series of paintings that contextualise some of the films (for example those set in the Democratic Republic of Congo and also Iraq if my memory serves correctly).
And with that, Belgium, whose pavillion is located near the entrance of Giardini, basically eclipsed all of its neighbours for me. Hashtag first surprise at Giardini.
The practicals:
You could easily spend a good half hour if not more here, enjoying all the video works.
You'll need a ticket to Giardini in order to visit this show.
The official pavillion website link is here. 
Artist; Francis Alÿs 
Curator; Hilde Teerlinck.