Stopped ball !!
Mahmood,
Waheeda,
Hussain,
Jalal,
Abdulla,
Jaafer,
Mohammed,
Ali,
Hassan,
Sadiq,
Hussain:
Mother, Father...
When can we play?
To my children:
Play after Prayer!!
These lines stand as a lead up to the installation next to two photographs showing Waheeda Mallulah together with ten neighborhood youths; all seem to be impatiently waiting to be allowed to play soccer. Whilst their white clothes are hanging in space, her own black dress is spread out on the floor. The artist, in the form of a life-size banner stand, is on the defensive in front of the goal. On the black wall at the rear, she has written “baba” (daddy) and “Mama” can be read on the other side, in black on a white background. Here, she wishes to underline the decisive guidance of children through their parents in the early years.
Soccer, Bahrain’s national sport, is for Waheeda Mallulah the point of departure to reflect on her identity and role attributed to her from birth as girl and woman. The rules of the game and related social mechanisms serve her as model and structure for the staging of feelings and the projection of desires. But far from fostering the fame of a celebrated and aggressive top goal scorer, her dreams see her in the position of the goalkeeper who resists all attacks and has the job of keeping the team’s box clean.
Waheeda Mallulah, however, denies all too direct interpretations. As part of the installation, a series of photos show her in different poses. On one of these, she is lying on her back, under the red net and next to her black robe, with arms spread out. Asked if an interpretation for this could be that a breakaway from the traditional female role is seen as problematic and maybe not so easy to realize, she only replies: "I don’t know… sometimes yes, but we still try to smile!"
At least, for many girls in Waheeda Mallulah’s home country, the dream of playing soccer has been fulfilled. Bahrain was one of the first countries of the Arab world to promote female soccer. At the beginning of 2004, a three-year school project involving compulsory soccer-classes for girls was initiated [1]. And whereas the close failure of the national team to qualify for the World Cup in Germany was received as a national tragedy, the country prepared an euphoric reception for the woman’s team, following its victory at the end of February 2006 in Abu Dahbi at the first Arab woman’s soccer championship.
When Waheeda one day becomes the mother of girls, she will naturally allow them to go to the pitch with the neighbor’s boys – but only after Prayer...
Note:
1. Rainer Hennies: Scheherazade schnürt die Fußballstiefel. In: taz, 5.2.2004, p. 13
Text by the curators Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt
(From the German: Helen Adkins)