Four Compositions on Francis Alÿs' Children's Games

Myhr, Slinckx, Gryka and Castelló with the Cikada Ensemble

12–14 September 2025

Astrup Fearnley Museet

130–300 kr

Showings and tickets

Friday, 12/09

16:00–17:15

World premiere

Astrup Fearnley Museet

130–300 kr

Buy ticket

35 % off with ultiMATE

Sunday, 14/09

15:00–16:15

Astrup Fearnley Museet

130–300 kr

Buy ticket

35 % off with ultiMATE

Children flying kites in Afghanistan, playing knucklebones in Nepal. Snail races in Belgium, orange dances in Denmark.

Since 1999, Francis Alÿs has recorded children at play around the world. Children’s ability to transcend harsh, even implicitly violent environments through imagination forms a thread that connects Alÿs’ films, which otherwise depict games and contexts that are uniquely their own.

In this concert, four composers respond with new works for the Cikada Ensemble, diving into the rhythms, logics, and emotional stakes of play, as serious as it is fleeting, as politically specific as it is universal.

Kim Myhr sees children’s games as acts of total presence—not light distractions but intense and absorbing moments. His music invites adult listeners to reconnect with the immediacy, rawness, and wonder of childhood.

Pierre Slinckx’s #29 builds on a haunting image: children climbing and hurling themselves down dusty slopes of mining waste in Lubumbashi inside of discarded tires. Like small Sisyphus figures, they repeat the ascent—a cycle that echoes both the persistence of colonisation and the hidden costs of extractivism. Slinckx responds with a fractured echo of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—childhood innocence thrown into stark relief by the weight of the landscape.

Aleksandra Gryka hears play as quiet resistance, as connection. Her music lingers where body, environment and imagination blur. Each film inspires a distinct constellation of instruments, echoing the fleeting emotional textures in Alÿs’s images.

Angélica Castelló’s Juglariceando lets the musicians play—quite literally. Using a score built like a card game, she invites unpredictability, accidents and surprise.

Can music sound like play feels?

Programme

Kim Myhr New work
Pierre Slinckx #29
Aleksandra Gryka New work
Angélica Castelló Juglariceando

All works receive their world premiere on 12 September.

A curated selection of the films used by the composers will be screened in the performance hall from September 12 to 14 during regular museum opening hours. Entry is included with a museum ticket.

Facts

Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) is a Belgian artist based in Mexico City, known for his poetic and political perspectives on everyday movements and rituals. The videos shown in this concert are part of Children’s Games, a growing series of nearly 50 works that depict moments of sociality and joy.
Cikada Ensemble takes its name from the cicada – an insect that spends years underground before emerging with its distinctive song. The metaphor reflects the ensemble’s ethos: thorough artistic preparation culminating in precise and intense musical presence.
Astrup Fearnley Museet is Oslo’s leading contemporary art museum, known for its Renzo Piano-designed building and bold collection featuring artists such as Cindy Sherman, Bjarne Melgaard and Nairy Baghramian.