Francis Alÿs releases a fox inside the National Portrait Gallery for Nightwatch

In 2004, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (born Antwerp, 1959; lives in Mexico City) released a live fox inside the National Portrait Gallery in London, one of Europe's most prestigious painting museums. The performance, later turned into a video installation titled Nightwatch—an ironic reference to Rembrandt's painting of the same name—was recorded using the museum's own security camera system. Alÿs chose the National Portrait Gallery specifically for its surveillance setup, which includes about twenty monitors all in plain view. The work responds to London's extensive video-surveillance network: the artist noted that for a foreigner, especially from a place like Mexico City, the level of monitoring is shocking, with every British citizen captured on camera approximately 300 times daily, revealing something about the public's relationship with public space. The video excerpt shows the fox darting through the museum's deserted, silent galleries, evoking themes of nature versus culture, surveillance paranoia, and the shifting roles of observer and observed. The animal appears almost as if it has stepped out of one of the paintings, ready to reclaim its freedom.