For the occasion of Ballet of the Masses, HKW presents Portent (2024) by multidisciplinary artist Eddie Peake. The performance is a five-a-side football match played ‘seriously’ and competitively, the difference being that it takes place in a gallery context and all players are entirely nude, except for the socks and trainers that distinguish their teams. Receiving a new title at every location where it’s staged, Portent is the fourth iteration of this work, first staged in 2012 as Touch at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Each re-enactment of this work has occurred in a different country, and as such it presents football as a social and multi-sensorial experience and practice, showing how certain aspects of society manifest in and reconcile themselves to distinct places and traditions. The work engages with how the representation and performance of maleness, nudity, touch and tactility, homoeroticism and exhibitionism produces echoes and dissonances between different cultural instances—from contact sports to museums. Peake’s practice often points at the tensions and potential between rigid societal expectations and uninhibited expressions of masculinity, conflicting categorical divisions between queerness and straightness, and canonical art and popular culture. Portent extends an invitation to engage critically with the both seriousness and silliness of masculinity, and the multiple possibilities around sex, sexuality and gender that a stereotypical male, macho, and heteronormative space like football traditionally offers, along with the conventions that take precedence in historicized art spaces. In each iteration, the performances also expose the varying nuances of local football culture and machismo. Echoing the theatricality attributed by art critic Michael Fried in the 1960’s to minimalist sculpture, the relation the audience has with the artwork and/or the game, entails a fundamental part of the commentary that plays out.

Players: Andi (2. KF THC Franziskaner / Orange Utans), Emil, Julian Hötzel, Julian Moreno Motta, Max Ablass, Ned, Nikolaus A., Philipp, Sam Nimmrichter, Stefano Aprà, Vin

This event takes place in the frame of On Football and the Theatre of Collective Body Making.