Soccer in all its states. This is how the exhibition Hors-Jeu (Out Of Play) could be presented. After Euro 2016, which was held in France from June 10 to July 10, this contemporary art event intends to extend the fervor while taking a step aside. The ambition of the exhibition is to bring together two worlds: the most popular sport in the world and a field often considered, wrongly, as elitist. From this meeting is born an intermediate zone where images, videos and objects lead us to apprehend differently what everyone knows.
More than a sport, soccer is indeed an extraordinary cultural phenomenon, a total social fact, to use the expression of the ethnologist Marcel Mauss. To talk about soccer today is to open up broad community perspectives that combine economic and political dimensions, in addition to its purely playful and technical character. By playing with soccer, by questioning its representations and by displacing its codes, the artists of the exhibition Hors-Jeu try to take the ball in the air and to invent new angles of attack. By combining humor and abstraction, dreamlike strangeness and documentary approach, Hors-Jeu wishes to multiply the points of view on soccer which continues to arouse passions and controversies.