Jump Ball, a group exhibition featuring international and Greek artists, transforms the entire gallery into a fantastical basketball court, thus challenging the pristine, enclosed gallery spaces.
The exhibition plays with the artists’ reflection upon issues that matter in everyday lives, inspired by life inside but also away from the court.
It touches upon the close relationship between art and life turning its focus on basketball; as a popular game, a spectacle but also a locus of connection and a field of antagonism. It examines basketball as a cultural phenomenon in terms of both content and range of artefacts used. It seeks the way politics manifest in the everyday and discusses the material cultures of the political. Basketball refers to a series of images, events, forms, and feelings. As a game, it’s able to create alliances but also reify differences. It brings politics back down to everyday life. Jump Ball delves into this sports’ culture, considering its rules and violations as well as portraying its social, political and cultural significance, contemplating on issues of mass spectacle, celebrity culture, gender and ethnicity.
Basketball, consequently, provides numerous corollaries with art. Grace and fluidity of movement are characteristic attributes in the game. Each player develops their own unique approach towards the game resulting in a constant evolution of style. The roles and rules of basketball and art alike is a way of doing and being in the everyday. Both are a means of “play”, knowledge and action with an unpredictable yet forceful potential.