Marianna Simnett: Winner

WINNER

Marianna Simnett’s “Winner” is a multichannel film installation, conceived as a three-act ballet for film told through the lens of football. It is commissioned on the occasion of the 2024 European Football Championship, hosted by Germany.

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  Marianna Simnett, The Severed Tail, 2022, Venedig

• – Marianna Simnett, storyboard image, Winner, 2024

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“Winner” echoes the dramaturgy of the game and dissects its socially constructed power hierarchies, crowd psychology, and constant pressure to perform. Through the element of dance, the work restages and radically transforms football’s most impassioned moments: elation and triumph, brutality and ferocity, suffering and defeat.

The film is adapted from the 1954 short story “The Destructors” by Graham Greene and performed by a group of contemporary dancers who role-play as fans, players, ticket officers, and wardens. Morphing between human and animal form, they are on a quest to wreak havoc on and around the pitch. The plot pivots around the group’s destruction of a magical-realist house of cards, owned by a former referee whose decisions are paramount to the winning and losing of a game.

Simnett’s vivid hallucinatory world extends beyond the screen into the exhibition space and the museum garden. It matches and simultaneously subverts the architecture and choreography of football. Spatial barriers reminiscent of stadium fences lead viewers through the installation, while the film itself travels around the space, occasionally interrupted by AI vendors offering hotdogs and beer.

Marianna Simnett’s (b. 1986 in London, UK; lives and works in Berlin) multidisciplinary artistic approach brings together film, dance, music, and artificial intelligence in this bold and fantastical deconstruction of the sport and its societal impact.

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Directors of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and Charlotte Knaup, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

The exhibition is a contribution to the art and culture programme for UEFA EURO 2024 and is supported by the Stiftung Fußball & Kultur EURO 2024 gGmbH with federal funds

A special exhibition by the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Runtime: Fri, 17/05/2024 to Sun, 03/11/2024

Takes place here:

• Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart

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