Qatar-critical performance by football migrant Ahilan Ratnamohan during voetbalfestivaldefootball.

Ahilan Ratnamohan came to Europe to expand his career as a professional footballer. He set out on another path and now operates from Antwerp as a theatre maker.

Monday, May 28, 2018 — The World Cup in Russia is hardly over and we are already looking ahead to the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. In 2022, Qatar will be hosting one of the biggest spectacles in the world: the FIFA World Cup. The fact that the organization of this football circus is in the hands of Qatar is making many a tongue wag. Together with the enormous stadiums in sandy settings, there are stories about mass exploitation of underpaid labourers, generally with migrant backgrounds.

Performance artist and footballer Ahilan Ratnamohan travelled to Qatar, Nepal and Sri Lanka, where he stood eye to eye with the realities required to build this World Cup dream. With the help of interviews with the workers, he looks behind the scenes of the picture that the Western media is holding up to us. He looked directly into the lives of those who have been doing the hard fieldwork. He discovered that – like in the beautiful game of football itself – reality often deceives us.

Mercenary is a collaboration between Sri Lankan-Australian artist Ahilan Ratnamohan and Mutamassik, an Egyptian-Italian-American musician. Ratnamohan once came to Europe to expand his career as a professional footballer (a career that never took off). He set out on another path and now operates from Antwerp as a theatre maker and the founder of the Star Boys Collective. In Mercenary, we see Ratnamohan’s characteristic football dance vocabulary, on this occasion complemented with Mutamassik’s punk jaw and pan-African electronica.

Belgian avant-première
MERCENARY by Ahilan Ratnamohan (AU/BE)
Friday 29.06 20:30
Beursschouwburg - gouden zaal
FREE ENTRY
Rerserve your spot: [email protected]

World premiere on 21.06 at Battersea Arts Centre during LIFT, London.
Belgian premiere on 27.09 at Monty, Antwerp.

During the World Cup, Beursschouwburg wants to show you many faces of football. 
Find out more on voetbalfestivaldefootball.

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About Beursschouwburg

Beursschouwburg is a multidisciplinary center for arts and reflection, an open meeting place strongly anchored in Brussels’ reality. Here we embrace the local, the global and the glocal. 

Beursschouwburg functions as a platform to present and develop a wide array of art practices and research, as a  support and experimentation network for artists, collectives and thinkers; a hub that questions normativity and welcomes new narratives.

Together with collaborators, we co-create programs that ignite fruitful encounters between different audiences, forms and genres, between art and everyday life, between the emerging and the established, between urgency and joy.

Beursschouwburg
Auguste Ortsstraat 20-28
1000 Brussel

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