This exhibition, organised by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in close co-operation with the Institut für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, presents films, photographs, paintings, sculptures and video installations by fifteen artists: Carlos Amorales, Stefan Banz, Heike Baranowsky, Roderick Buchanan, Richard Fauguet, Tamara Grcic, Julie Henry, Hans-Jörg Mayer, Tracey Moffatt, Jonathan Monk, Muntean/Rosenblum, Daisuke Nakayama, Paul Pfeiffer, Vibeke Tandberg.

Sport provides an environment for practising - seriously or playfully - competitiveness and ambition, social behaviour and role patterns, it conveys physical ideals and teaches social instincts or intensive self-perception. This is where attack and defence, instinct and strategy, individualism and national pride come together. The emotional involvement of the fans in the game, their ritual identification with a team, makes them part of the event in the stadium.

Passionate discussions accompany victories and defeats in sport and distract from economic and political interests, which are pushed into the background. Sports clothes and trainers with a particular label are part of the fashion uniform of a youth culture that claims individuality as its guiding value. Just like fashion and pop culture, sport, too, provides individual role models and value concepts that are accepted world-wide like, for example, the idealised form of the human body or the rules of fair and foul play.

The struggle on the sports field can be seen as a metaphor for life's struggle, which is also the struggle against the competition, for individuality and social recognition, or simply for financial success.

The structures of our social and political reality are mirrored in sport, a "celebration of the instinctual drive which is central to our social behaviour and the survival of any group", Marshall McLuhan remarked back in the 1950s.

A 144-page catalogue in German and English has been published by the Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg to accompany the exhibition with contributions by Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Britta Schmid, Raimar Stange and Ellen Seifermann.

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