Artist's Statement

FUGERE (A Series of Olympiadic Moments) is an exploration into the strangeness of the realm of professional sport : a loaded intersection between franchise deals and the disenfranchised, between nationalism and statelessness, often a heavily marketed balancing act that can come crumbling down with a simple head-butt to the chest as with Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup.

The idea is based on the contradictions of international sports competitions being inherently nationalistic and refugees, by definition, being stateless.  The project stems from strange moments in sport such as the significance of a Palestinian ‘national’ football team playing an international friendly or the USA basketball team accepting the gold medal in 1992 with some players draped in the US flag in order to hide the Reebok logo on their national team track suit as it went against their individual Nike franchise deals.

The work is for anyone not fully convinced by the simplicity of slogans such as 'Impossible is Nothing’ and ‘Just Do It’ particularly when it is being said by young athletes from troubled or difficult pasts and particularly as it is most strongly targeted at kids that know all too well that in fact ‘Impossible is Everything’ or at least that most things are impossible.

I was also thinking about the double role of stadiums. Episodes such as Taliban or Pinochet style public executions or the Velodrome d'Hiver during the Vichy regime in France, versus a moment like Hurricane Katrina where stadiums become places of refuge.

Haig  Aivazian
2009