Celebrate the Final Gallery Opening at Roebling Hall, Williamsburg!

This Saturday June 3, 6-8pm preview party

The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker and Franklin Sirmans is the first exhibition of its kind in the United States. The exhibition launches in New York June 9th and runs through July 22nd, 2006, coordinated to coincide with the World Cup in Germany. The Beautiful Game celebrates the art form of soccer/fútbol and its global impact via works by artists from all over the world. Embracing the world’s favorite game that continues to grow here in the U.S., the exhibition brings together an international group of artists who explore the game and its metaphorical potential to represent human beings across the world with vibrant and poetic artworks. The artists use the sport to examine issues of identity construction, nationalism, culture and gender politics, mass spectacle, crowd behavior and the global economy in contemporary society.

This portion of the show is the last exhibition at Roebling Hall’s Brooklyn gallery. Including the work of 12 video artists and one sculptor, the exhibition demonstrates video’s prevalence as a form of art and offers a chance to view works by some of contemporary art’s most sought after video artists. Running in duration from a minute-and-a-half to the regulation game time of 90+ minutes, the videos show a range of approaches from the diary (Jürgen Teller watching his beloved German national team lose in the last World Cup final) to the documentary (Ömer Ali Kazma granted access to shoot behind the scenes with Turkey’s most celebrated club Galatasaray). Other works also demonstrate the flexible nature of video as a medium and the influence of constantly changing technology on video art.

Beautiful Game Artists at Roebling Hall, Williamsburg: Gustavo Artigas, Roderick Buchanan, Rob Carter, Julie Henry, Ömer Ali Kazma, Jessika Miekeley, Navin Norling, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Marcelo Pina & Nelson Soza, Robin Rhode, Jürgen Teller, Grazia Toderi and Uri Tzaig.

The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol is curated by Trevor Schoonmaker and Franklin Sirmans in cooperation with Roebling Hall, the Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art (BICA), BRIC (Brooklyn Information & Culture, Inc.), Rotunda Gallery (a program of BRIC), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and Habana Outpost.