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The Cultural Frontline: The Beautiful Game: Art, football and the World Cup

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How football has inspired the arts

05/11/2022 GMT

The Beautiful Game: Art, football and the World Cup

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, The Beautiful Game: Art, football and the World Cup

With the Fifa World Cup in Qatar, we look at the relationship between art and football

Discussing arts and the beautiful game are novelist Rabih Alameddine, painter Martin Kazanietz, composer Shirley Thompson and video game developer Victor Daniyan.

The Fifa World Cup is being held in Qatar. The country’s been gearing up for this huge event commissioning a broad array of art projects. However human rights groups have repeatedly complained about the bad treatment of foreign labourers building the stadia, and there are also concerns for LGBTQ+ fans attending the matches, in a country where homosexuality remains illegal.  

Rabih Alameddine is an award-winning Lebanese US novelist and painter, whose books cover topics including the Aids epidemic, the Lebanese civil war, exile and gender identity. He is also a huge football fan and he tells Tina Daheley about what hosting the World Cup in an Arab country means for the region and discusses football’s attitude to sexuality. 

Argentina is famous for its legendary footballers, but amateur football is also huge in the country. Artist Martin Kazanietz captures this love of five-a-side and the social side of soccer in his paintings and he tells us about his own passion for the amateur game.

The Uefa Women's EUROs took place in England this year, with a record audience of more than 365 million people watching worldwide. The tournament appointed British Jamaican, professor Shirley Thompson as composer in residence. She created two works, Momentum, a Concerto for Football and Orchestra, the other, an anthem called Beautiful Game, both performed by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Shirley told The Cultural Frontline’s Andrea Kidd about the pieces. 

Nigeria might have missed out on a place in the World Cup, but one man who’s putting the country’s footballers on the virtual international playing field is Victor Daniyan. For the last three years he’s been painstakingly creating a Pan African video football game. Victor explains why it’s important for him to develop this interactive platform.

(Photo credit: Colin Anderson Productions Pty Ltd/Getty Images)

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