These powerful works by Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud are from an exhibition that travels across Canada and focuses on issues of racial marginalization. Specifically, racial and gender inequality in professional sports.
In that show, To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, Mohamoud highlights the professional sports industry, which she equates with a covert form of neo-slavery. The London, Ontario-born artist transforms athletic equipment and symbols to illustrate pervasive, discriminatory behaviours and attitudes based on race, class, gender, and sexuality. (Above – One of the Boys series, here)
In Heavy, Heavy (Hoop Dreams) above, what looks like dozens of dented, deflated Spalding basketballs rest on a surface that resembles a deep black reflecting pond. “The chalk-coloured balls are cast in concrete, though, and are dead and weighty,” writes Alison Gillmour in Galleries West. “Through this materiality, Mohamoud toys with illusion and reality, suggesting that pro sports, which seem like a promise of wealth and success for many young Black men, are actually an impossible mirage, a form of cruel hope.”
Image at top of post: Esmaa Mohamoud. Glorious Bones, 46 repurposed football helmets, textiles, recycled tires, steel stands. She used sculpture, photography, video, and installation to investigates how high-level athletics operate as sites of corporate profit and discrimination.
Esmaa Mohamoud website, here.
One of many onlines features on To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, here.
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