15.4.-14.7.2024
INGEBORG LÜSCHER
Fusion
15.4.-14.7.2024
Fusion
The German-Swiss artist Ingeborg Lüscher (b. 1936) has for more than 60 years developed an extensive and diverse oeuvre consisting of sculptures, paintings, performances, photographs and video installations. Her works often appear as socially critical artistic analyses of people’s sometimes absurd and irrational behaviour and thinking.
One of Ingeborg Lüscher’s most famous video works is Fusion, which she presented in connection with the Venice Biennale in 2001. In Fusion, two well-known Swiss football teams, Grashoppers Zürich and St. Gallen, play against each other – among them some of the great football idols of the turn of the Millennium.
The players’ club associations, otherwise made easily recognizable through coloured jerseys, have been disguised as they battle wearing the finest Italian designer suits. The expensive clothes that symbolize the sport’s alliances with capitalism and competitive economic thinking, however, become more and more worn during the emotion-driven and less and less rule-compliant match.
The audience witnesses fraud in the form of unexpected team changes, sneaky offside traps and calculated own goals. In a mixture of chaotic play and financial gambling, where the ball is sometimes replaced with laptops or mobile phones, everyone fights with and against each other until pure emotions take over and cancel the dualistic principle of football. In an ecstatic fusion of euphoria and excitement about the connecting qualities and unpredictability of the sport, the clubs eventually merge with each other. It’s no longer about winning – or is it?
Ingeborg Lüscher’s Fusion will be on display at Museum Jorn over the summer of 2024, while the European Football Championship is being held in Germany. The video is projected onto a large screen in the museum’s small outdoor arena, where there is also a small football pitch. The pitch invites you to play football with not just two, but three teams. The sport is called triolectic football and was invented by Asger Jorn in order to illustrate a more defensive concept of a game, that is not decided in a match against each other, but in a harmony-seeking and balanced interaction with each other.
Ingeborg Lüscher
Fusion, 2001
Video 8.5 min.
© videoart.ch / Ingeborg Lüscher