Francis Alÿs "is one of the most humane and poetic artists at work today", said Laura Cumming in The Observer.
Born in Antwerp in 1959 and long based in Mexico, he is probably best known for his "tremendous" ongoing video series "Children's Games". Since 1999, he has been filming children at play all over the world, his camera recording everything from snail racing in Belgium to improvised games of jacks in Nepal to kite flying in Afghanistan – an activity famously banned by the Taliban.
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Violence frequently punctures the fun, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. One film sees a group of Ukrainian children playing a game called "Air Raid Alert", in which voices imitating the noise of sirens become "intolerable" for one young participant, who "suddenly flees the camera".
In Mosul, Iraqi adolescents play football, running and tackling amid "burnt-out cars and shattered buildings", stopping only when gunfire interrupts play. It takes a moment to notice that they don't actually have a ball; in 2015, a caption informs us, 13 teenage boys were publicly executed by Islamic State for the crime of watching a televised football match.
The show never feels intrusive or voyeuristic: whatever he does, Alÿs's work is always "a collaboration with the participants" and he knows "when to stop". "Ricochets" is "an often heart-stopping and frequently beautiful" exhibition.
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