XXIX. ‘A provocation called football’ by Bárbara Rousseaux
Post game celebrations at Discovery Soccer Park Sandton
Eight days before the 1976 military coup in Argentina, Jomo Sono scored not one, not two, but four goals against the Latin American team. South Africa was hosting the Argentine football team for a match at the Rand Stadium in Soweto and ended up winning 5-0. This was the first mixed race team in South Africa to play against an international visitor. When they won, “teammates, black and white, did what teammates have always done: hugged and shook hands'', as Nicholas Griffin puts it. Three months later, Soweto would be the stage of a very different confrontation; one between the township’s Black youth and the apartheid’s armed police forces. In July 1976, the South African Football Association (SAFA) was expelled from FIFA.
From the late 1960s, when Robben Island’s prison authorities allowed the formation of the Makana Football Association, to Winnie Mandela’s football club in the 1980s[i], the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) win, the allegations of fixed matches in the 2000s, the 2010 World Cup, and the Senzo Meyiwa case — football has stayed close to South Africa’s political developments. This connection spans the victories, camaraderie, violence, uprisings, as well as the corruption and internal party divisions. But has also been evident in how the political establishment has capitalised on the sport post-1994. For evidence, look no further than two iconic photographs: Neil Tovey lifting the 1996 AFCON Trophy alongside Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk, and Mandela and Graça Michel smiling and waving at the closing ceremony of the 2010 World Cup at Soccer City stadium.
Football offers an expansive window through which to observe and think of South Africa. Phokeng Setai and Alex Richards considered this when they launched their project, Exhibition Match, in 2022. During a conversation I had with the project’s curators, both concurred that football “is a vehicle to transmit a feeling, an energy, an emotion you respond to psychologically and physically”, and that one could “think similarly about art”. Composed of a match between members of the local art ecosystem and an exhibition, Exhibition Match explores the intersections between these two fields. The first iteration of the project was hosted in Cape Town in February 2022 with a football match in Gardens, a Members Lounge and an exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation.
Members Lounge, 2022. Courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation
Beyond the parallels one could draw between the football and arts economy — players as artists or artworks that circulate when commercialised, clubs as galleries, and so on — Setai and Richards like to think about football and art as “spaces for participation”.
“Potentially, they’re both free spaces when you take commerciality out of it”, said Richards.
For Setai, the project is “another way of flattening the geography: if you're not an art person or don't consider yourself an art person, but you have a strong relationship to football, there's an entry point for you. If you're not a football person but you back yourself with your art knowledge there's an entry point for you. Because of their force globally, these are two things you can't escape.”
Kendell Geers' Masked Ball at Art Joburg 2023
The notion of community can easily become a safe space to locate a creative practice, a collaboration or an exhibition. Often, one comes across the term sitting loosely in texts and mentioned in panel discussions without further interrogation of what community is being addressed, or how an institution or a fair is ‘building a community’. What I find refreshing when thinking about community through football, is that it sparks conversations beyond the positive associations generally attached to the concept. In football, as in politics, there can be joy, celebration and togetherness, but there can also be fracture, misogyny and violence. The latter is something that is rarely mentioned in the artworld’s generic and oft-repeated community discourse. In that sense, Exhibition Match’s feature for FNB Art Joburg Fair 2023 – Masked Balls (2002/2023) by Kendell Geers – was a welcome provocation.
Eleven footballs covered in latex masks of Presidents (Putin, Bush, Zuma, and others) were made available for fair attendants to kick and throw around. The playfulness of Geers’ installation made collectors, artists and schoolkids want to stay around the booth to laugh and take photos. Perhaps, that was it: that people were having so much fun playing with Presidents heads is the piece’s statement. The performative installation laid bare how fun can exist within violence, or rather, how joy can sometimes be permeated with a certain impulse for destruction. This is generally accepted with children, less so with adults. In a hyper-commercial space like a fair, these balls were not for sale[ii].
Kendell Geers' Masked Ball at Art Joburg 2023
The fact that the installation was so well-received[iii] reflects our current era, a time marked by the exhaustion of traditional party-politics, widespread distrust of politicians, and frustration with the state of things. These feelings can sometimes be channelled through humour, something Geers’ work successfully taps into. Historically, exhaustion has also made space for violent ‘anti-politics’ discourses. These can easily be spotted in emerging far-right figures without a traditional political career path such as Javier Milei, the Argentine Presidential candidate who says that if he wins in October “he will finish with the political ‘caste’“ and “blow up the Central Bank”.
“I think violence is an interesting chat in general because in this country (as in many others, if not all of them) there is a recurrent violence that happens every day in different forms. Some are more veiled, some more direct”, said Richards. It’s through the huge “vessel” that is football that both curators get to think about the complexity of community in the South African arts, as well as its vast manifestations and contradictions.
“At a time when young people are being asked to vote and play their part, the idea of participation in relation to politics becomes interesting. And having Kendell’s installation where people kick the heads of Presidents, makes a connection, discursively, which I think can be unearthed”, said Setai.
This year also marked their first time Exhibition Match travelled to Joburg, opening new avenues for the curators to think of football in relation to a different setting for their match. Gauteng is also where South Africa’s strongest football teams are based: Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Mamelodi Sundowns. “It is a place that is a little bit more real in terms of the South African experience than Cape Town, for instance”, commented Richards. Joburg is also the city where two iconic Biennials took place.
Players gather for team photo after Exhibition Match for Art Joburg 2023
The 1990s constitutes a decade of interest for the duo. Richards, for example, was only eight years old when South Africa won the AFCON in 1996, a time he recalls with affection: “there was something with how the politics of the rainbow nation were shaped that wasn't realistic or right. But because I was a child at the time, I have a deep love and nostalgia for that moment. It was also the best our football team has ever been… but I do think it’s important to interrogate memory in order to understand nation building politics.”
Reflecting on that, Setai added that he thinks “there is a juxtaposition between the aspirations of that [1990s] decade and the desperation that we are grappling with now, as a nation. Sometimes, art and football can make or break your heart, but just for that moment in time… So I don't think there's always scope within the ordinary time and space of looking at an artwork or watching a football game to interrogate these things deeply. But if you can point to a decade and ask ‘what does it mean to think about where art was, where football was and where we are now?’ That alone does something to one's consciousness.”
Earlier this year, Alex and Phokeng realised there was a precursor to their project, a football match between artists in the context of the 1995 Joburg Biennial. “Someone had mentioned to us that there was a football match that happened in ‘95. We looked everywhere and couldn't find anything about it. And then we found this book of Kendell's and the only thing about the match was an image, there was no text. So that made us engage with Kendell, which caused us to see Kendell's work. Everything feels like it happens in an organic way”, said Richards.
The conspiracy of Images (in your Eye) - A football match during the 1st Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, courtesy of Kendell Geers
Kendell Geers’ football match ‘happening’ was played at the Mary Fitzgerald square in Newtown between local and international artists participating in the 1995 Biennale. If one thinks of this performance, the ‘96 AFCON win and Okwui Enwezor’s ‘97 Biennale Trade Routes: History and Geography – which contested the idea of traditional national pavilions – the Pan-African sentiment of the time was clear. This is something Richards and Setai want to incorporate in their project too going forwards. At the Kickstarting a Cultural Resistance talk that took place during the FNB Art Joburg fair alongside Bongi Dhlomo and David Andrews, Richards mentioned they want Exhibition Match to travel to “Bamako, Lubumbashi and Dakar”.
The football stadium is a political arena: a space for myth-making, a tool for nation building. And as with any tool, it can be weaponised. Throughout history, this has happened over and over again. Like with the 1986 World Cup match between Brazil and Iraq; a match that never happened, but one that was euphorically commented on live radio as an Iraqi win. Agri Ismaïl writes: “It was their greatest victory in history, and the fact that it is an easily dispelled fiction is not enough to dislodge the event from the [Iraqi] collective memory. In every way that matters, the victory did take place, conjured into reality by a radio commentator forced to orate a fictive play-by-play, creating an alternative reality so alluring that it slipped into the world as a fact”.
Beyond its political instrumentalisation, football allows people that have little or nothing in common to share a moment of emotion, where productive time is paused and for a moment it’s just that: the tension before a penalty, a sweaty hug with a stranger to celebrate a goal, the crescendo of a packed stadium singing football chants, a crowded sports bar. This getting together aspect of football (and art) is something Exhibition Match actively works on by having both recurrent and new people play at their matches every time. But overall, I think that what makes Setai and Richards’ project feel very relevant is that it doesn’t just speak about community in the South African arts, it sets it in motion.
[i] Jonny Steinberg’s book Winnie & Nelson (2023) sharply retells the controversies around Mandela United Football Club’s activities, the club initiated by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in Orlando West, and how that sparked conflict within the ANC.
[ii] Although one can’t ignore that whatever sits within the overarching commercial setting of the fair still benefits from commerciality in one way or another. Exposure does contribute to an artwork's symbolic value and, ultimately, to its price. Goodman Gallery’s Instagram post of Geers’ installation proves the commercial relevance of the work being shown and interacted with in the context of the Fair. So, by no means commerciality is entirely removed. Moreover, people have to pay to get into the fair, it takes place in Sandton, etc.
[iii] At least to my knowledge, there weren't any accusations of the work being inappropriate or incendiary.
Bárbara Rousseaux is an Argentine writer and creative producer based in Joburg. In 2018, she moved to South Africa to work at the Embassy of Argentina and coordinate their cultural programme. Since then, she has been harnessing cultural ties between Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. She currently works at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) and is the co-founder of drift, a literary agency that represents African authors in Latin America and Spain.
