Sporting Art

Fifa fever takes on a new space: an art gallery houses Riyas Komu’s latest exhibition celebrating football.

Fifa fever takes on a new space: an art gallery houses Riyas Komu’s latest exhibition celebrating football.

Entering gallery Maskara’s Warehouse on 3rd Pasta road in Colaba, Mumbai, one is faced with a massive grey 30 ft goalpost made of concrete and steel. This compelling structure is part of artist Riyas Komu’s latest show, Subrato to Cesar. ‘When we root for the likes of Julio Cesar, we could move backwards a bit and try to appreciate our own Subratos,’ Komu says in his invitation, referencing the Brazilian and Indian goalkeepers. 

The launch of the exhibition coincided with the opening World Cup match between South Africa and Mexico. Originally intended as a solo show for a gallery in London, Komu altered it to suit an Indian context when the London show dates clashed with his own plans to travel to South Africa for the World Cup. The show uses football as a metaphor for the marginalised and the dislocated, a major subject of Komu’s art. 

“Our own footballers are a forgotten lot,” Komu says. “We have just indulged in passing the ball amongst ourselves without making much progress even when much of the opposition to our soccer advances have come from within.” 

The exhibition transforms the warehouse gallery into an on-site installation that took 10 days and a 25-man team to create. The imposing goalpost strategically divides the gallery space. On one side of the wall, visitors are invited to view select screenings of World Cup matches while seated on hand-carved stools with footballs enclosed within. This speaks of the game’s limitations within Indian society. “We are sitting on our own destiny, our own ignorance,” Komu says. “The wall partitions the best quality football and Indian football.” 

This is not Komu’s first football-inspired exhibition, but an extension of a four-year interest. Two years ago, the Indian women’s national football team was forced to go on a hiatus due to lack of support and resources. “The bulk of the Indian women’s football team are made of members from Manipur. How can a team represent one whole troubled state?” Komu questions. He attributes a turning point in his understanding of the game to his meeting in 2007 with the Iraqi football team, who were then in exile. The Iraqi captain gave a speech against American occupation after their Asian Cup victory, declaring, “We’ve defeated the enemy.” The phrase politicised the game for Komu. “I began looking at football anthropologically,” he says. “It was no longer just a game.” 

Subrato to Cesar is also a comment on urban India. “By shrinking a football field into a concrete wall, I question how a city should handle its public spaces,” says Komu. This also alludes to the experience of migrants, who leave vast village fields for small cubicles in the city. Komu himself arrived in Bombay in 1992 from Kerala, and is familiar with the survival instinct migrants possess. This instinct has served him well in an art process that requires constant adaptation. “This was an incredibly difficult show to install,” says curator Abhay Maskara. “Like football, we had to be flexible on the field. The gameplan keeps changing.”

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Wei Fen Lee