![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO3-IMG6-IM_Dube-Moreau_Mohamoud_No-Fields_02_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Untitled (No Fields)<\/em>, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Georgia Scherman Projects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This is how the young multidisciplinary artist Esmaa Mohamoud presented her installation Untitled (No Fields)<\/em>(2018), part of the touring exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary<\/em> Art<\/em>.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Presented from May 12 to September 16, 2018, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Toured by the Royal Ontario Museum. Curators: Silvia Forni, Julie Crooks, and Dominique Fontaine. Curator of the adaptation for Montr\u00e9al: Genevi\u00e8ve Goyer-Ouimette.<\/span> Exploring ways that sports and racial issues interconnect in contemporary society, Mohamoud frequently draws from the codes and materials of the basketball and football industries to build powerful images that probe the politics of Black bodies, particularly male ones, or of Blackness. Researcher Samantha N. Sheppard, who interrogates Black visibility in media images, notably those from American sports movies, similarly connects the spectacle of sports with the expression of Black histories.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Samantha N. Sheppard, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen<\/em> (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). Mohamoud\u2019s work Untitled (No Fields)<\/em> adorns the book cover.<\/span> She, too, focuses her analyses on the worlds of basketball and football, because, she explains, of \u201cthe contemporary magnitude of these sports in popular culture and their importance (in terms of participation and cultural impact) to African-American communities.”5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., p. 7.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mohamoud\u2019s installation is in fact inspired by events in the NFL (National Football League) in the United States in 2016, when quarterback Colin Kaepernick started a protest movement against police brutality directed at African Americans by kneeling during the national anthem at the opening of the game.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Mohamoud revisitedUntitled (No Fields)<\/em> in 2019 with the work The Dark Knight (No Fields)<\/em>, which, in her view, personified Kaepernick. This sculpture is included in the solo exhibition Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in The Face of Certain Defeat<\/em>, organized by Museum London and touring Canada until 2023.<\/span>. Mohamoud cited the gesture in a performance presented during the inauguration of Here We Are Here at the Royal Ontario Museum, during which the model from the photograph, again dressed in the weighty equipment, marched through the museum spaces and up the stairway to the exhibition, where he knelt symbolically.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Presented January 27 to April 22, 2018, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cTake a knee\u201d movement, intermittently surfacing in the world of sports and activism after 2016, forcefully re-emerged after the murder of George Floyd was captured on video on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis. That spring, the sports world underwent a significant polarization, manifested by an unprecedented surge of demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. During the following months, sev\u00aderal politically and emotionally powerful images went viral. I\u2019m thinking of those of members of the NBA (National Basketball Association) in the United States wearing jerseys that read \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe\u201d; of the athletes, arm in arm, singing Lift Every Voice and Sing <\/em>(also called the \u201cBlack national anthem\u201d); and of star tennis player Naomi Osaka wearing face masks bearing the names of victims of police brutality. The bleachers being largely empty due to health measures, these images were destined for the whole world to see, well beyond the sports arena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even a league such as the NFL \u2014 which was still using arguments about the apolitical nature of sports and respect for the national flag to curb the demonstrations against racism in its ranks begun by Kaepernick in 2016 \u2014 would officially declare itself against racial inequality in the United States. On June 4, 2020, several of the NFL\u2019s top players published a video on social media titled Strong Together<\/em> as a means of applying pressure. Each in turn poses the question, \u201cWhat if I was George Floyd?\u201d The video, viewed millions of times, condemns outright the league\u2019s tacit racism and scant support for its Black talent by demanding that it declare its solidarity with the antiracist movement. The next day, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took a public stand to this effect.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See, among others, Chloe Melas, \u201cNFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Says League Was Wrong for Not Listening to Players Earlier About Racism,\u201d CNN, June 6, 2020, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n And yet, for there to have been sports images to convey current events, there had to have been live sports in 2020. While the media and cultural industries had to compete in ingenuity to remain active at a distance despite the massive closures of creative and public venues, professional sports industries resisted the hiatus. Big leagues, such as the NBA and the NFL, implemented various types of health\u201cbubbles\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - The bubbles were variously configured, depending on the league. The newest definition of the word \u201cbubble\u201d<\/em> (added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in January 2021), refers to \u201can area within which sports teams stay isolated from the general public during a series of scheduled games so as to prevent exposure to disease and that includes accommodations, amenities, and the location at which the games are held\u201d (Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2021).<\/span> to allow the regular seasons to unfold \u2014 live \u2014 nonetheless. What this reveals about the economic power of these industries is one facet of the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here, the imperviousness of professional sports to the threat of coronavirus prompts me to recontextualize Lewis\u2019s question: who matters in professional sports? Posed at the intersection of racial issues, when we know that around 75 percent of NBA and NFL players are Black, this question leads to the heart of the issue of the safety and exploitation of people of African descent. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Mohamoud deals with the commodification of Black bodies head-on through notions of human capital and Black labour in relation to the economy of college and professional sports. She sums up these correspondences in the concept of \u201cneo-slavery,\u201d explaining that in studying the world of basketball and football, she observed \u201ca lot of parallels between contemporary forms of slavery, which [elle croit] believe[s] athleticism in the sport world is for Black people today, and historical forms of slavery.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Esmaa Mohamoud, quoted in Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh, \u201cEsmaa Mohamoud: Game Changer,\u201d Border Crossings, no. 155 (November 2020): 61 61.<\/span> One of the touchstones here is tangible access to sports.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - I deal further with this issue, particularly with respect to women\u2019s access to professional sports, in my column \u201cWAGS moi non plus,\u201d published on Urbania.ca in 2019.<\/span> Beyond the clich\u00e9 of the millionaire player with a high capital of media visibility, the reality is altogether different. Only 1 to 2 percent of university athletes \u2014 the mandatory path to the NBA and NFL \u2014 make it to the professional level; the others sign away their bodies \u2014 often without getting a degree \u2014 to the benefit of one organization, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, that rakes in billions in annual revenue without paying the players a salary, while the coaches, mostly white, make millions a year.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - See, among other sources, Stephen J. Dubner, \u201cNot Just Another Labor Force,\u201d podcast, Freakonomics Radio, January 30, 2019, accessible online. <\/span> The devaluation of Black talent is an issue that Mohamoud often transposes from sports to the arts. On the topic of her participation in the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood<\/em> (2017) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where she presented a body of work around basketball, she said, \u201cI\u2019ve always been hyper-aware of how our bodies have become minimized and compressed and to some extent disposable. It\u2019s like we come in, we get tokenized, we get thrown out rightafter.\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Esmaa Mohamoud, quoted in Amanda Parris, \u201cWhy Esmaa Mohamoud Is Bringing Blackness and Basketball into the Gallery,\u201d CBC, July 20, 2017, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Sporting Blackness<\/em>, Sheppard similarly maintains the importance of proposing critical readings of Black sporting bodies in order to understand their contemporary manifestations in light of the broader visual heritage of Black histories.15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Sheppard, Sporting Blackness .<\/span>. She relies, among others, on the works of Hank Willis Thomas, whose photographs, such as And One<\/em> (2011) and The Cotton Bowl<\/em> (2011), merge football with the iconography of slavery and public executions by activating narrative devices in line with Mohamoud\u2019s aesthetic language. According to Sheppard, stories of violence borne by Black bodies must be understood as a \u201cracialized corporeality\u201d or an \u201cexpressive historicity\u201d that is experienced, embodied, and always (re)performed in the physical and political memory of bodies, and which, by the same token, infuses sports images with broader sociohistorical iconographic references.16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 1-27.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mohamoud\u2019s hanging sculpture Chain Gang<\/em> (2018), for instance, links past with present at a single stroke by exploring the ambivalent significance of metal chains, which, in football, serve as an on-field tool to measure the first down, but which historically distill political meanings regarding slavery and the overrepresentation of Black populations in the prison system. The six consecutive pairs of cleated shoes tied to chain links can suggest both the interchangeability of the players, who replace and follow one another, and the tying of bodies together and restriction of movement during transportation or forced labour.17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 17 <\/a> - This last analogy was suggested by Charles Reeve, \u201cHow Artist Esmaa Mohamoud Reveals the Dark Heart of American Athletics,\u201d Frieze, no. 201 (March 2019), accessible online.<\/span> Allusions to violence and to danger also lie at the heart of Mohamoud\u2019s installation Glorious Bones<\/em> (2019), which features forty-six used football helmets \u2014 the number of players dressed up and ready to play at an NFL game \u2014 covered in wax prints and placed on vertical stakes.18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 18 <\/a> - Drawing inspiration from the work of theoretician Jennifer Doyle on the \u201cathletic turn\u201d in contemporary art, Sheppard offers a nuanced analysis of this work in Sporting Blackness<\/em> (189 \u2014 90, note 65).<\/span> Their inside foam padding has been removed, however, and the equipment, now stripped of its crucial protective function, becomes a serious accelerator of concussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of a sudden, this cloud of heads floating above the ground is in serious danger. In the same way, I wonder if, in the context of COVID-19 and the bubbles that have allowed the football league to hold its games, we haven\u2019t been witnessing a new form of danger in sports: the exposure of the players \u2014 along with their families and immediate communities \u2014 to the dangers of a very aggressive and poorly understood virus. Given that the majority of the players at risk are Black and that the NFL, even today, remains the exclusive property of white people, does the persistence of the sport in 2020 not act as a magnifying lens on structures that endorse the capitalization and spectacularization of violence and racial discrimination in the sports industry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n To conclude, though COVID-19 and the BLM movement may seem far apart, these few intersecting reflections on their effects on sports imagery allow, I believe, for new readings of Mohamoud\u2019s art. Her works on basketball and football from 2015 to 2019 seem \u2014 more than ever in a post-2020 context \u2014 to call for truly inclusive sports, and sports that are produced differently. And in one fell swoop, Mohamoud invites us to move our gaze from sports institutions to art institutions, to reflect on who is in play and who occupies the space in contemporary art.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO3-IMG1-IM_Dube-Moreau_Mohamoud_One-of-the-Boys_01_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/strong>One of the Boys (Yellow Back),<\/em> 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Georgia Scherman Projects <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
I turn briefly to the work of art historian Sarah E. Lewis, founder of the Vision and Justice Project<\/em>, which advocates for the catalyzing function that cultural images can have regarding social justice. In the recent anthology Black Futures<\/em> (2020), Lewis argues that one of the main societal roles of images should be to urge us to imagine emancipatory narratives and spaces of affirmation and, especially, to broaden our definition of who matters9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Sarah E. Lewis, \u201cThe Vision and Justice Project,\u201d in Black Futures<\/em>, ed. Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham (New York: One World, 2020), 358 \u2014 61. 358-361. In a manner altogether germane to my concerns, this book places contemporary art, social media, and sports images on an equal footing by mapping Black inspirations and experiences of recent years.<\/span> \u2014 a potential that does seem to be realized by such social networking videos as \u201cStrong Together\u201d<\/em> and by Mohamoud\u2019s works. With respect to the regime of representations, it is interesting to note that the rise of political activism in sports coincided with the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced fans to gather in front of their screens in 2020 and 2021 and magnified, as it were, the significance or potency of TV sports entertainment. In fact, one could even argue that, generally speaking, the scarcity of live original content created and broadcast during the pandemic has doubtless contributed to the predominance, in number and power, of sports images in the media and on social networks. Might this scarcity have served as a megaphone for the athletes? And, incidentally, might it have enhanced and intensified the meaning of contemporary artworks that, like Mohamoud\u2019s, shed light on both the promise and the violence that professional sports entail for young, racialized men in North America?<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO3-IMG4-IM_Dube-Moreau_Mohamoud_Glorious-Bones_05_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Glorious Bones<\/em>, 2019.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Georgia Scherman Projects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO3-IMG5-IM_Dube-Moreau_Willis-Thomas_And-One_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
And One<\/em>, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Goodman Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/103-DO3-IMG7-IM_Dube-Moreau_Mohamoud_Chain-Gang_01_CMYK-scaled.jpeg\")
Chain Gang<\/em>, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Georgia Scherman Projects<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n