Sarah Ortmeyer

Sarah Ortmeyer’s BALLS was the final exhibition at Vienna’s HHDM (Hinter Haus des Meeres, ‘Behind House of the Sea’), an artist-run space founded in 2012 by Daphne Ahlers, Roland Matthias Gaberz and Philipp Timischl. For it Ortmeyer completely covered the walls of the small space with an arrangement of Panini brand football stickers and small, white celluloid balls.

The elements’ arrangement in tight groupings recalled strategy boards, game plans or pin-marked maps. The walls themselves became a kind of football field, but the ‘tactical’ composition here alluded to the rules of the game off-pitch: BALLS is a comment on the coming out of German footballer Thomas Hitzlsperger in early 2014. Hitzlsperger was not only the first former member of the German national team to publicly declare his homosexuality, but the first of any national team. Tellingly he only did so once his career was over.

The Panini stickers symbolized the kind of rigid, seemingly unchanging societal structures that underpin such conditions. Tacitly, they also pointed to the practice of collecting – for Freud, an act compensating for unfulfilled sexual desire. By choosing these collectable cards as her format, Ortmeyer showed these respected, heroically supercharged sporting celebrities as childishly cute, almost doll-like – more plaything than player.

For some time now, the artist has worked with gaming principles and corresponding social rules. Earlier this year, she took chess as her theme (for the third time) for a show entitled KISH KUSH at Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv. Using a similar approach to BALLS, she combined press images of female chess players hung on the walls with chess pieces spread around the space. Here, too, gender attributions were involved: arranged in groups, the (male connoted) chess pieces took on an anthropomorphic quality; the surrounding glossy, large-format pictures of the posing females outshone them. Just as it seems absurd that professional chess players would have to adopt such lascivious poses for their highly unphysical game, it is just as absurd that there seems to be an unwritten rule against footballers publicly coming out as gay in today’s sporting culture. As Ortmeyer’s playful reversals show, the rules of the game, especially in gender politics, are made off the pitch.

BALLS was Ortmeyer’s second engagement with football, a theme also dealt with in her MACHO AMORE show at Federico Vavassori in Milan last year. Both exhibitions were statements on wider issues. MACHO AMORE explored the cathartic potential in the rivalry between Milan’s two home teams. Collaborating with Leonard Kahlcke, Ortmeyer arranged their team strips into 11 framed compositions. BALLS was a far more direct comment on social phenomena. Hitzlsperger was invited to the opening, though he did not attend. It was the combination of a relaxed, ironic approach to form and an interest in a dialogue beyond a self-referential art discourse that made this show so compelling.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell