Francis Alÿs: Ricochets – a 'heart-stopping' exhibition at London's Barbican

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. 

Each film is "brief, enthralling to watch and beautifully observed". Each shows "inventiveness, vitality, resourcefulness, joy" – the "power of resilience and solidarity" of childhood play. This show at London's Barbican brings together many of the 40-plus videos the artist has made to date, alongside drawings and animations created over the course of his travels. 

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It is a "mesmerising" exhibition that demands to be seen. "Ricochets" is a "cacophonous" experience, said Anna Parker in ArtReview magazine. Ten films play at once in a single gallery, filling the space with "shrieking and laughing", as well as the onslaught of sound created by the games themselves: in Havana, children race across "unfinished concrete" on improvised go-karts; snow makes a "squeaky crunch" as it is compacted under the weight of sledges in Switzerland; in Morocco, kids clack pebbles together before skimming them across the sea towards Gibraltar.

That many videos have been made in combat zones is no coincidence: "in wartime settings, children are powerless, but because ordinary routines have been disrupted, perversely they are left freer to play". Alÿs captures one example in Kharkiv, where he films boys dressed in combat fatigues manning a makeshift checkpoint and flagging down cars to inspect papers or demand a password (the Ukrainian word for bread, which Russians find hard to pronounce).

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.

Barbican Art Gallery, London EC1. Until 1 September