35. Spieltag - reloaded

A football match lasts 90 minutes, the goals are square, a season has 34 matchdays — seemingly immutable constants. The project "Matchday 35 – Reloaded" started precisely at this point: It took the rules, rhythms, and routines of football as aesthetic material and opened up a space in which artistic practice could question, shift, and reinterpret this order.

As part of a three-year studio grant from the city of Bremen, a collaborative workspace emerged at the Center for Art in Woltmershausen, taking football seriously as a cultural phenomenon: as a site of social belonging, as a stage for identity, and as a system of gestures, rules, and narratives. Continuous research, exchange, and public exposure culminated in a group exhibition in the Tabakquartier in the summer of 2024, complemented by film screenings, discussions, lectures, and music.

A key component was the direct integration into the day-to-day operations of the game. Invited artists and groups attended Bremer SV home matches and translated these encounters into independent artistic works. These works formed the core of the exhibition and made match days visible as spaces of experience—not as illustrations of the sport itself, but as transformations of atmosphere, dynamics, and collective experience.

The communal studio in the tobacco district served as a creative center and organizational hub. Works from the fields of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, and photography were exhibited—both in the public areas of the studio building and in the stadium at Panzenberg, where artistic interventions took place during the season.

Beyond artistic production, the project pursued an urban planning perspective. It culturally connected Walle and Woltmershausen—two districts separated by the Weser River and historically shaped by port and working-class culture—and created links between local places, audiences, and practices.

Matchday 35 – reloaded thus positioned itself as an experimental space for reflection between sport and art: a project that did not consume football as a theme, but exposed its mechanisms and developed new forms of perception, exchange and artistic publicity from it.

Participating artists:
Bissan Badran, Heike Kati Barath, Claudia Bartholomäus, Norbert Bauer, Bremer SV, Bastian Fritsch, Anastasiia Guzenkova, Tom Gefken, Anja Fussbach, Tobias Hübel, Sihle Inensiko, Paul Ole Janns, Ivo Kiefer, Manfred Kirschner, Yohan Koo, Werner Kuhrmann, Patricia Lambertus, Dominik Meitzler and Tobias Horoschko, Lisa Sinan Mrozinski, Amir Omerovic, Barbara Rosengarth, Simon Schadwinkel, John Sempe, Yoriko Seto, Ralf Tekaat, Oliver Voigt, Rainer Weber