Marianna Simnett – WINNER

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin

Exhibition documentation, 2024

This series documents Marianna Simnett’s multichannel film installation WINNER, conceived as a three-act dance for film on the occasion of the 2024 European Football Championship in Germany. The commission focused on installation views and the way choreography, sound and projection transformed the exhibition space into a hallucinatory football arena, where crowd psychology, hierarchy and the pressure to perform were restaged through dancers shifting between hooligans, players and spectators.

Exhibition text by Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

Marianna Simnett’s WINNER is a multichannel film installation, conceived as a three-act dance for film told through the lens of football. It is commissioned on the occasion of the 2024 European Football Championship, hosted by Germany.

WINNER echoes the dramaturgy of the game and dissects its socially constructed power hierarchies, crowd psychology, and constant pressure to perform. Through the element of dance, the work restages and radically transforms football’s most impassioned moments: elation and triumph, brutality and ferocity, suffering and defeat.

Set on a football pitch, the film is adapted from the 1954 short story The Destructors by Graham Greene. An extraordinary group of dancers morphs between hooligans and footballers. The plot pivots around the group’s destruction of a magical-realist house of cards, owned by a former referee whose decisions are paramount to the winning and losing of a game. Presiding over the action and chanting from the stands are a chorus of baby Ultra fans, voiced by the American singer and performer Lydia Lunch.

Simnett’s vivid hallucinatory world extends beyond the screen into the exhibition space, subverting the architecture of football and transporting it into the museum. Upon entering a long tunnel, alluding to the womb-like passage that footballers run through before beginning the game, viewers will be met with a choreography of images which travel around the room, interrupted by melancholic songs about winning.

[Text source: Hamburger Bahnhof]