Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin When the Islamic State seized the Iraqi city of Mosul, clerics directed boys to give up the playing field for the battlefield. Religious leaders banned soccer shorts. They also forbade whistling, reasoning that devils might be summoned by the noise.
For three years, occasional matches were monitored by armed jihadists. Ultimately the sport was deemed haram – unlawful – and all but forbidden. Several boys who broke the rules were executed.
In 2017, shortly after the Islamic State was defeated, the artist-filmmaker Francis Alÿs arrived in Mosul with a video camera. He found boys playing soccer in the pitted streets. Amidst the wreckage, gameplay was as normal as could be, with one notable exception: There was no ball.
Alÿs soon found out that the boys had invented new rules, eliminating the ball to circumvent the clerics' wartime ban. This variant persisted after the jihadists were gone for no other reason than that it turned out to be fun. Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #39: Parol, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2023 In collaboration with Julien .
.. [+] Devaux, Félix Blume, and Hanna Tsyba Francis Alÿs For the past quarter century, Alÿs has been documenting children’s games wherever he travels.
His series was partly inspired by a painting created by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1560, which Alÿs first saw as a child. Children's Games is a larger-than-life panel depicting more than eighty forms of play popular in 16 th .