CURRENTLY SHOWING

A Ball in our Head - The cult of football

c. 200 drawings, videos, products, games, drafts and campaigns reflecting the cult of football

This exhibition in the Forum Gestaltung with some 200 exhibits gives a most entertaining overview of the way in which the cult of football dominates the world, influencing the thoughts and ideas, associations and the imagery of creative people everywhere – whether the results are meant seriously or are tongue-in-cheek, whether they appear in the real or the virtual world. A BALL IN OUR HEAD brings together an international selection of work in the fields of graphic art, product design, film and animation, photography and installation objects.

Football has become much more than a team sport played and loved all around the world. A global cult has grown up surrounding the game, which draws its main sustenance from the media and is inseparable from their methods and content. In this way the football cult with its staged events, norms and icons has become part of social life. The more it has come to dominate people’s thinking, the language and the images they use, the more allusions to the „Cult of the Kickers“ can be found in the work of artists and designers. For the entertainment industry and in politics, fashion and the media, the ball has been „headed“ in so many highly accomplished ways over recent years that we are justified in regarding the work shown in this exhibition, the first of its kind, as particularly successful examples of cult-inspired design.