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Out of Pakistan
2004- ongoing
Current state, tent 280x150x150 cm - tarpaulin 280 x 300 cm
38 Illustrations, 4 frames, 50cm x 70 cm each
Pakistan is producing 80% of sport balls sold in the world. Almost 75% of these are made in the city of Sialkot that services for more than 200 producers People flock to this city from far away to find work and produce the items that are marketed as "lifestyle" products.
The balls that are all hand made are manufactured in close to 2000 workshops. In the cities sheds and backyards are rafley 40000 men and women stitching away, each subcontracting to a Pakistani company.
Most modern footballs are stitched from 32 panels of waterproofed leather or plastic- 12 regular pentagons and 20 regular hexagons. The panels are Hand stitched; with pre punched stitching holes (combined with a latex bladder)- in this way 32 Panels are held by 720 stitches that a soccer ball need to be accomplished. A skilled worker needs three hours and 750 stitches to piece together the 32 separate panels with waxed thread with a maximum of three balls a day to deliver to the downtown manufacturer. His or her reward will be the equivalent of 1,80€ a day. Their handiwork will sell as quality product under a brand name that costs close to a 100€ in European stores.To make ends meet many families have been including their children into the manufacturing process.
In 1996 however, during the European championship, activists lobbied to end the use of child labor. This eventually led to the Atlanta Agreement, which seeks to reform the industry to eliminate the use of child labor in the production of balls. The outcome however is still controversial because the former integrated minors are now send to work in more dangerous working environments and the production lines are focused on factory facilitations often difficult to reach by the locals that have to travel every day and are disconnected with their social bounds. Throughout the last two years it got a lot worse, if you go today in a sport shop you will find that the trend clearly goes to glued soccer balls that are made in several East Asian countries.
Chinese competition is threatening from below, bombarding the market with cheap, mechanically stitched balls. The Thai producers are bearing down from above, whittling away at Khawaja's market share with their high-tech, glued product. His competitors have already scored a major victory. This year's World Cup stadiums will not be sporting hand-stitched Adidas balls from Sialkot. Glued balls from Thailand will be taking pride of place.
It takes strength to drive the needle through the thick plastic. I made the experience myself working on this project. For over five years I have been collecting old soccer balls, dismantling them, cutting out the pentagons and sewing the remaining pieces to become a tarpaulin. There is only a certain amount of pieces one can sew before ones fingertips say- that’s it. The collected items have all been played and wear the marks of heavy usage.
This project has been my long lasting ambition to create a sculpture that can serve as a refuge shelter entirely made of soccer balls. 2009 it will finally reach a surface size that will make it recognizable as a tent like shelter, a survival tent entirely manufactured by soccer balls.
I also used the inflatable bladders (usually made of either latex) to make a comfortable air mattress that guaranties a soft and cozy sleeping surface.
During this project I have also teamed up with the German artist/ illustrator Martin Markes that created accompanying illustrations to this project.
Our junction point originated in a newspaper article based on a story wherein German custom officials discovered two Pakistani minors in a cargo container full of sporting equipment at the international cargo airport in Frankfurt. Like media sources claimed, the two boys that have been employed, as ball stichers in the city of Sialkot were eager to travel to a country were the best soccer is played.
My sculptural work goes along with the 38 illustrations of M.Markes that contain a visual diary of their adventures journey.Between the evergreen lawn of the stadiums and the dusty ball factories exists a space in whom dreams and reality mix.. Both works invite you on a fantastic journey to the land and the people of whom we know little and can only assume.
Please check out the article by Uwe Buse, Football and chains http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,418139,00.html
Ballroom
2007
Collection of balls (marbles to fist size ball specimens), steam bath with sandblasted Plexiglas membrane, light tubes, oversized glass test tubes with primal colored ball selection
In 2007 I had an exhibition in Wiesbaden in the Gallery of The Fluxus Freunde Wiesbaden e. V
in cooperation with the Finnish artists Sari Palosaari and Mia Rinne. The Exhibition was curated by artist group located in Frankfurt a M called 431 art and the show went under the name “Northbound-installations and media art from Finland”.
The exhibition spaces were located in a former Jewish bath and consisted of various shower and spa facilities that were provided to install spatial artworks. One of the cabins provided me with a stainless steel bath that I modified for the work “ Ballroom”.
Remembering the childhood pleasure of lying within a sea of balls I filled the bath with over thousand unique specimens of balls. These have been collected over the last five years and just were asking for to being presented in this particular way.
The work went together with the work “Pharma CV”, a color sorted selection of balls in oversized glass blown test tubes on the wall.
Greenaway dish
2003
Bouquet of color selected balls in glass bowls
The works name refers to the British film director Peter Greenaway.
The objects are displayed in an almost clinical style namely as specimen’s that grow in Petri dishes, nevertheless the balls colonies seem to overflow in their fruity and fresh appearance. The arrangement made me think of the beautiful food and flower displays as being seen in Peter Greenaway’s movie, The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover.
The visual hallmark of Greenaway's cinema is the heavy influence of Renaissance painting, and Flemish painting in particular, notably in scenic composition and illumination and the concomitant contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death.
Skinned Polygons
2001-2004
60x70x6cm
Collection of unfolded bodies, Twelve out of eighteen pieces
Paper, Steel needles, Collagen, Ink, Graphite drawing on Aquarelle paper
Originally my interest in spherical geometry came from Cartography, the study and practice of making representations of the Globe on a flat surface. Quite soon I was fascinated by spherical geometry that deals with polygons (especially triangles) on the sphere and explains how to find relations between the involved angles. This is of great importance for calculations in astronomy and earth-surface and orbital/space navigation.
The most familiar spherical polyhedron is the football (soccer ball), thought of as a spherical truncated icosahedron. Many of the cutting forms used for the work were found in contemporary ball design and went along with the collection Mappa Mundi that I was building up parallel to this work. Contrary to the unfolded balls- that were supposed to alienate in their unfolded stage- I wanted to give the skinned polygons some hint to their former spherical shape, a visual code so to speak. I especially liked the unfolded cutting form of a classical Mercator style globe were one can fit the parts together by aligning the continental shapes to each other. North and South Pole give a clear
sense of up and down and North America is to the left and East Asia to the right. I was searching for an equivalent image that would work in a more abstract but basically similar way.I found it in the simple image of text and its simple classifications of linearity. Linear writing systems are those in which the characters are composed of lines, such as the Latin alphabet.
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols, within our understanding of text it comes in the Latin alphabetic form. It is cultural as well as cognitive anchored and understood as a- left to right pattern and going from the top to the bottom of the page. The text images that I used were unique for each polyhedral design and based on a written text that I manipulated with a set of Photoshop filters to a point that they were unreadable but still recognized as an continuing text face.
I was building spatial paper models of the polygons and marked the direction of the text direction as if it would run around a balloon shape, spiraling from up to down. When these models were back in a flat unfolded shape the text image was of course aligned along the curves of its former spatial form. Through this visual presentation the observer gets a clue how the fragments are connected to each other. The text was applied to the material collagen by using mirrored ink jet prints in the stage when the material has been moisturized and can be imprinted. Through its special structure it will suck in the ink without that it would further spread into a fuzzy blur.
Likewise the skin is the bodies most outer boarder, the material of the skinned polygons is a fragile layer tissue called collagen.
Collagen is the main protein of connective tissue in animals and the most abundant protein in mammals, making up about 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content. Collagen is one of the long, fibrous structural proteins it is responsible for skin strength.
From the Greek for glue, kolla, the word collagen means, "glue producer" and refers to the early process of boiling the skin and sinews of animals to obtain glue. Egyptians already used the Collagen adhesive about 2000 BC, and Native Americans used it in bows about 1500 years ago.
The collagen that I used was medical collagen that derived from young beef.
I obtained a great amount of it during a job doing nightshifts in a pharmaceutical company that were making anti wrinkle masks. Like most artist I do get exited discovering transitory materials used in industrial processes, there is so much material that we never get to see. Collagen was right away a big brainstormer. The material comes in 1-3 mm A3 sheets and is white, foam like and odorless. Similar to wood it seems to have an internal pointed structure, meaning one direction that one can easily rip. Moisturized it becomes flexible and can be stretched.
The polyhedral cutting forms that I used, started as construction drawings on paper and remains as underlying image. (I always liked to keep the process visible.)The wet collagen was fixed with needles to the joints of the construction drawing, Within a several day long drying process the material started to shrink. This way all the straight lines turn into curves as the tension forces start to work within the construction.
I especially like this point of the creation. From here an uncontrollable random element takes over the mathematic and geometrical concept. It’s out of my hands and I enjoy becoming the exited and surprised observer.
Spheres
2002
90x70x10cm, six objects
Frottage on semitransparent folio, foam object underneath
The Spheres are graphite rubbings of surfaces from various unfolded sport balls. A halo, nimbus like ring of light surrounds the outlines of the objects shape. The fuzzy aura that illuminates the frottage is emerging from a massive foam shape inside the frame.
In art, frottage (from French frotter, "to rub") is a surrealist and "automatic" method of creative production mostly known by the works of Max Ernst.
In frottage the artist takes a pencil or other drawing tool and makes a "rubbing" over a textured surface. I have experimented a lot with this technique in the past and it periodically comes back in my work.
For a genealogist as well as Archeologists the frottage or rubbing has often become the last record of grave monuments and engraved records that rapidly deteriorating.
The works seem to reefer to archeological finds and reveal their inner life best while being past.
