Marianna Simnett

Marianna Simnett’s WINNER is a multichannel film installation, conceived as a three-act dance for film told through the lens of football. It is commissioned on the occasion of the 2024 European Football Championship, hosted by Germany. WINNER echoes the dramaturgy of the game and dissects its socially constructed power hierarchies, crowd psychology, and constant pressure to perform. Through the element of dance, the work restages and radically transforms football’s most impassioned moments: elation and triumph, brutality and ferocity, suffering and defeat. Simnett’s vivid hallucinatory world extends beyond the screen into the exhibition space, subverting the architecture of football and transporting it into the museum. This is the sixth in a series of publications accompanying solo exhibitions of contemporary artists at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. It comprises a curatorial essay by Charlotte Knaup, an extensive interview with the artist by Sam Bardaouil, and Graham Greene’s short story “The Destructors”, elements of which Marianna Simnett used for WINNER. Text in English and German.