AUT - Offside

ST PAUL St Gallery

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June 21 - July 20, 2007
Gallery One & Two

The exhibition OFFSIDE covers a wide range of works from funny (Lutz & Guggisberg), entertaining (Ingeborg Lüscher) to scary (Murray Hewitt), compelling (Roderick Buchanan) and disturbing (Erik Levine and Salla Tykkä). The show does not aim to have an easy and fashionable critical view on sports, but to explore how artists use the topic “sports” to talk about power and obedience, identity and loss, despair and belief.

Ulf Aminde Victims and Perpetrators, 2003-2004

Video, Double Projection, Courtesy of the Artist

Edith Amituanai The Manu Lounge, 2006

C-Type Photograph, Courtesy of the artist and Anna Miles Gallery Auckland

The Manu Lounge, 2006

“The Manu lounge, an interior belonging to a Christchurch relative looks at the domestic environment of a New Zealand Samoan family particularly styled by 'Lomona' the 'lady of the house'. The shrine-like mantelpiece, tiered display-stands encasing family photos, ornaments, silk flowers and photographs of sport teams through out the ages are all on display in this decorated front room.”

Edith Amituanai

Roderick Buchanan Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers, 2002

Single Channel Video 3:00 min, Courtesy of the Artist

For those who don't know their soccer, or football as it is called in Europe, or 'the beautiful game' as it is called in Britain, the two football clubs, Celtic and Rangers, are Glasgow's fierce rivals. Known as the two 'Old Firms', these clubs compete in their true colors: green and white for the Catholic club, Celtic and red, white and blue for the Protestant club, Rangers. And when these teams play, the loyalty of the fans is clearly defined; if you love one team, you hate the other. Consequently, if you are a Catholic and love the Rangers, you have some explaining to do. And if you are a Protestant and love the Celtics….well, it's time for another quick beer before your shirt gets shredded.

Buchanan's ongoing interest in competitive (professional) sport, the fervent fans of sport and the connection of sport to issues of culture, politics and religion is presented to us, quite often, directly from the sport or the fan of the sport, and it usually smacks of issues concerning culture, politics and/or religion.

In the case of Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers, youth, or more to the point, innocence comes into play. Buchanan has set up a video camera at a local highschool in Glasgow and has asked a group of young students to answer his questions: which team do you love? and, which team do you hate? Each student, whose face is captured up close, answers 'Rangers''or "Celtic'. During the playing of the DVD we see each student say Rangers and then, later in the production, Celtic. Whether we actually discern which team they love or hate is hard to tell, but it is evident that these youngsters are clearly indoctrinated via the profound influence of religion, in this case Catholicism and Protestantism, and have chosen 'their' club based criteria that go far beyond the hand-to-eye coordination skills of the players. These kids are devout, but not necessarily to their religious upbringing, but to their team, and it's very likely their children will also join the pack as well. Love/Hate/Celtic/Rangers and the repetition of the names, Celtic, Rangers, zeros-in on so many issues that go beyond the beautiful game.

Quoted in GoodWater Gallery, Toronto 

Murray Hewitt Burnings, 2006

Video, Courtesy of the Artist

'This work aims to create discussion about media rugby and its associated culture, touching on religious passion, propaganda and distraction.

The ideas are presented with a westie or Bogan aesthetic, humorous but at the same time unsettling. The fire-starter, along with other things, wears black and white Adidas footwear, a 70's crash helmet, and performs an extremist Christian ritual wearing an Islamic gown.

The ritual is a pseudo Ku Klux Klan burning. The original burnings are more correctly described as lightings: the Klansmen and to illuminate the source to both summon the other Klansmen and to illuminate the source of their belief. The early Klansmen were ancestors to Scottish highlanders who lit crosses at night to summon the surrounding clans to meet. The ritual is strange, the act of homage also an act of destruction, I like this inherent contradiction.'

Murray Hewitt

Quoted in The Film Archive, Auckland

Julie Henry Going Down, 1999

Video, Double Projection, Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London

In her efforts to document the realm of escapist fantasy, Julie Henry has focused her camera on various leisure activities of the British working class. Assuming the non-judgemental stance of a casual onlooker, Henry attends sporting events and pub talent contests in her native England, to consider the ways groups of men and women behave collectively in those public performance settings.

Although it is common to distinguish performers from their audiences, Henry consistently explores the dialectical relationship between the two. Her work frequently demonstrates how blurred the distinction may be. This phenomenon is most apparent in Henry’s two channel video Going Down (1999). Henry never shows the game itself but focuses instead on the fans seated in the bleachers at a soccer match. She symmetrically aligns the fans of their opponents on the left. As the video progresses, we gradually come to understand that one crowd cheers elatedly for the winners when the other side withdraws into relatively subdued moans and grumbles. Perhaps more compelling than our recognition of these opposing reactions is the liberated exhibitionism we witness from certain fans, particularly among the winning side. Many jump up and down, wave their arms through the air, and lead a booming victory chant. Such behaviour is hardly atypical of soccer fans, yet Henry’s concentrated focus renders the vehemence extraordinary, even frightening.

MGN in Strangers: the first ICP triennial of photography and video / edited by Brian Wallis ... [et al.]. Göttingen: Steidl; London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. (Published in association with the International Center of Photography.)

Erik Levine More Man, 2005

Courtesy of the Artist

Information about this work can be read in the catalogue of the exhibition More Man, April 12- May 12, 2007 at Space Other, Boston, USA

Ingeborg Lüscher Fusion, 2001

Video, Courtesy of the artist and videocompagny Zofingen (CH)

Video, Courtesy of the artists and videocompagny Zofingen (CH)

Jim Speers Akropolis, 2006 Video on DVD 37:22mns 

Courtesy of the artist and Jensen Gallery

“Akropolis is a work made in Vilnius in December of 2005. Presently formatted for three screen projection, the work is an episodic record of a project that centres around the difficulty of understanding an unfamiliar environment. The people I met both helped in the filming process and lent their perspectives, in some cases as characters within loosely drawn situations, and as interview and conversational participants. As a new arrival to this place working alone was unlikely to be profitable. I also lacked an interpretative background, which limited my ability to even ask sensible questions. In it’s structure and content the work is a reflection of this. As a result of the varied approaches bought together and its propositional construction I hope that the the work acknowledges my temporary accommodation within a social situation as well as the ideas I had in response to it.

Akropolis is named after what was the largest mall in Lithuania, In the middle of the mall an ice skating rink operates throughout the year . Here, at the first of four locations, a soccer team is filmed waiting in the middle of the night. In this scene and in those to follow I was interested in the men as a group, how they might relate to each other and the effect their presence has on an environment.

The relationship between history and environment became another strand as I became more aware of perceptions at odds with my own experience. A conversation occurs between a two men, one Finnish the other Lithuanian. They discuss the origins of each others language and in the process consider the contrasting experience of the two countries, relating language to circumstance, They speak in English, the language they share.

This dialogue makes a connection between the participants multi-lingualism and a fluid notion of history, where peoples and territories shift , going under one flag and then another. Another conversation entails the retelling of a story of the Lithuanian fighter pilot who flew for three countries.

In the work I looked for aspects of the city open to interpretation, other locations include the revolutionary park as a place to take your dog for a walk and the a hill overlooking the commercial city centre where the Virgin Mary made an appearance, (one of many following independence from the USSR).“

Jim Speers

Salla Tykkä Power, 1999

16mm film transferred to video, Courtesy of the Artist and the Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris/New York

More information on Power can be found on Salla Tykkä's website

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