Walker Art Center presents
The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image
Power Plays
Curated by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere
Friday, October 11, 2024
7:00 pm
Walker Cinema
A Note from the Curators
Tool for exploitation or arena of resistance? The paradoxical nature of sport—as a site of biopolitical control, collective struggle, and individualized fantasy—makes it a rich and captivating subject. This program challenges commonplace understandings of the sports film genre by focusing on artist-made media and counter-narratives rather than commercial documentary and fiction sports movies, which often service hagiographic or nationalistic agendas. Power Plays seeks to address some of the unseen political and economic flows of the globalized sports-media complex.
Themes in this program include the confluence of nationalism, militarism, exploitation, spectacle, and sport, as well as activist resistance to sport’s hegemonic tendencies; the complex imbrications of sports, race, gender, desire, and representation; and the interplay of sports technology, visuality, and public space.
— Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere
Program
Introduction by Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak
Keith Piper, The Nations Finest, 1990, 7 min.
Piper’s video mimics the look and tone of state propaganda with a silky, biting critique of the way predominantly white countries use Black bodies in the service of national pride while simultaneously disenfranchising their Black residents.
Sondra Perry, IT’S IN THE GAME ’17, 2017, 16 min.
This video departs from a legal action against the videogame developer EA Sports and the NCAA by college basketball players whose digital profiles were used in a videogame without their consent. “Perry compares this to how large museums have built their collection on looted objects from former colonies. By drawing this parallel, Perry makes us consider more recent forms of colonialization – a kind of digital variant – where the exploited are left watching a virtual copy of themselves, produced and profited on by large corporations” (Munchmuseet)
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, The Same Track, 2022, 5 min.
This film cuts together archival footage of Commonwealth Games athletes, spectators, and administrators with images of economic and promotional activity in various British colonies and commonwealth states, drawing attention to the fact that the Games are implicated in an ongoing political project, centuries in the making. The film was played on screens outside stadiums during the Commonwealth Games. (Adapted from the artist’s website for Equations for a Body at Rest)
Doplgenger, Fragments untitled #6, 2022, 6 min.
The two top football teams of Yugoslavia met at the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb on May 13, 1990. The match was never played.
This film vivisects media footage of the event from the private archives of citizens who recorded their televisions in the 1990s. It’s part of a series of works through which the artist duo investigates media images that helped create the historical narratives of Yugoslavia from the 1980s–2000s, especially the images that served as a pretext for the Yugoslav war and the fall of the country. (Adapted from the artists’ website)
Haig Aivazian, Prometheus, 2019, 23 min.
“In the first post-Soviet-era Olympic games in 1992, the ‘Dream Team’—a group of superstar NBA basketball players—swept away all opposition, going on to win the gold medal for the US. The team’s unquestionable dominance coincided with, and reflected, a new era of global politics, embodied in the US technological and environmental assault on Iraq a year prior.
Aivazian’s film draws parallels between these two events as paradigm shifts in hard and soft power, exploring the celebration of violence that occurs in the passing of the torch, both literal and metaphorical. Fire is the main trans-historical narrative motor here, a fire only momentarily contained, only partially domesticated, but repeatedly mobilised, since its theft from the heights of Mount Olympus, to its unleashing on the oil fields of Kuwait.” (H.A.)
Run time: 57 min.
Screening prior to introduction
Fethi Sahraoui, Youthupia: an Algerian Tale, 2019, 7 min.
“In 2019, Algerians gathered in the largest popular uprising against then Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (who sought a fifth presidential term), to manifest their rejection of the perceived corrupt elite that governed the country. [...] During the uprisings, these young football fans [70% of Algeria’s population are under 30 years old] brought their engagement and enthusiasm from the stadium to the streets, actively participating and even leading the demonstrations. As a consequence, the political protests came to resonate with songs derived from football fan chants, now transformed into powerful slogans against corruption.” (Moderna Museet)
Screening on Loop in the Bentson Mediatheque
Wednesday–Friday, October 9–11
Haile Gerima, Hour Glass, 1971, 14 min.
About the Curators
ASTRIA SUPARAK’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science-fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Her work as an artist has been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Kitchen, and Expo Chicago, as well as for such unconventional spaces as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Based in Oakland, California, Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Artadia Award.
BRETT KASHMERE is a filmmaker, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. His creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Kashmere’s films and videos have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Kassel Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Photography, UnionDocs, CROSSROADS, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He is executive director of Canyon Cinema Foundation, founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and co-editor of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! Kashmere holds a PhD in film & digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
About the series
The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image
No time for winners (or losers)! Spanning 13 decades of filmmaking, from pre-cinema to post-internet, guest curators Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere’s six-part screening and performance series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive. The Game is Not the Thing offers an antidote to commercial documentary and mainstream feature film narratives, looking instead to the creative and critical approaches that artists and amateurs bring to the “sports film.”
Artists included
Haig Aivazian, Santiago Álvarez, Ottomar Anschütz, Pamela Belding, Skip Blumberg, Jon Bois, Torika Bolatagici, Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, Claude Fournier & Claude Jutra, Mark Bradford, Pedro Burns, Tintin Cooper, Charles Dekeukeleire, William K.L. Dickson, Doplgenger, Thomas A. Edison, Köken Ergun, Nicole Franklin, Bonnie Friedman, Haile Gerima, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Ana Hušman, I AM A BOYS CHOIR, Internet, Takashi Ito, Adam Khalil & Adam Piron, Guy Kozak, Iyabo Kwayana, Karen Luong, Louis Malle, Gao Mingyan, Babeth Mondini-VanLoo, Darius Clark Monroe, Antoni Muntadas, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Nam June Paik, C.F. Partoon, Sondra Perry, Pied La Biche, Keith Piper, Rachel Rampleman, Macon Reed, Fethi Sahraoui, Markus Scherer, Lillian Schwartz, Ashley Hans Sheirl & Ursula Pürrer, Shen Jie (Central News Documentary Film Studio), Martine Syms, Salla Tykkä,Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, dana washington-queen, Zhang Qing
Read More
Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere discuss the series and the paradoxical nature of sports and fandom in their essay on the Walker Reader.
Living Land Acknowledgement
The Walker Cinema and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
About the Walker Art Center
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