Gunners and Runners





Starting June 9th there will be excitement and prayers, tears and shouts of jubilation, fist fights and dancing, racist jibes and anti-racist agitation: The World Cup inflames the passions of millions. The O.K Center for Contemporary Art traces the enormous emotional impact of fandom and positions art, film, documentation, the self-aestheticization of fans and fan commerce in a highly charged relationship.


You‘ll never walk alone - the exhibition named after the legendary battle hymn from Liverpool additionally seeks to reconstruct changes in the concept of fans through a reflection on the space of the stadium: from the everyday cultural rituals of the crowd, through hooligan branding and all the way to domestication in the "disneyfied" and rigidly monitored entertainment arenas of the present.


Gunners and Runners (2006) shows two forms of intercultural displacement as they come together along the relocation of the British football club Arsenal: A world class stadium financed by Emirates airline clashes with the doubtful and unbidden infrastructures of Islamic migration. Everyday encounters between English football fans and migratory populations turn the space of the city into a stage for the ambiguities of prosperity, legality and security characteristic of the neoliberal transformation of Western society.




-------------------------------------------------------------




You'll Never Walk Alone

Football and Fan Culture


O.K Centre for Contemporary Art - Linz

Group Exhibition

Works by Stephen Dean FR/US, Josef Dabernig /AT, Massimo Furlan /CH, Julie Henry /GB, Peter Hörmanseder /AT, Kurt Lackner /AT, Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer /AT, Antoni Muntadas /ES, Grazia Toderi /IT Auftragsarbeiten von: Wolfgang Dorninger /AT, Barbara Musil & Gunda Wiesner/AT, Antonio Ortega /ES.

Objects and photographs from "Progetto Ultra", IT fan archive, Gerd Dembowski’s /DE and Dieter Brasch’s /AT privat archives, the collection Klaus Littmann /CH and Claude Pascal‘s /CH record collection.

Curators: Thomas Edlinger & Martin Sturm