The Febrile politics of the Middle East have consumed world football in recent months. In a World Cup qualifier on the 11th of October 2025, Erling Haaland scored a sumptuous hat-trick as Norway dominated Israel at the Ullevaal Stadion in Oslo under a sky of red, green, and black flares while pro-Palestinian protesters marched through the city. As Qatar gets closer to hosting the Fifa Arab Cup in late November, there are increasing reports of the country’s crackdown on protest and freedom of speech (Qatar, who hosted the Arab Cup in 2021, will also stage the 2029 and 2033 iterations, getting real bang for their buck after the $5 billion outlay for the 2022 World Cup). All while Tommy Robinson was in Israel sporting the blue and yellow of Maccabi Tel Aviv and threatening to break West Midlands Police’s ban on their fans, who are notorious for hooliganism, from travelling to Birmingham for a Europa League fixture against Aston Villa on the 6th November. For Iranian-American artist Shideh Soleimani, none of this comes as any surprise. ‘The collective energy, the rage and elation around wins and losses — mobs, parades, riots — mirror the emotional charge of protest,’ she says. It is this charge which animates her artistic work on football and protest, which is often concerned with how crowds mobilise around athletes and teams with the same urgency of political commitment.
Soleimani’s photographic tableaux explore the intersection between art and protest. In 2022, at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels, the artist displayed a series responding to the Qatar World Cup. Each photograph in the series is, as she describes, ‘anchored by a satellite image of the region where a specific crude oil blend is produced’. Layered onto these images are depictions of foodstuffs like milk (sometimes contaminated by oily blacks) and manufactured goods, things which Qatar tends to import from its neighbours because of the agricultural and trade systems that have been reshaped or disrupted by the presence of refineries. Oil pipes flow in and out of the scenes, while in ‘2022’ (p16 features an image from the same series) a woman’s body lays on the ground, defeated and dejected, her skin painted green like a football pitch; the black boot and football on her back appear to have delivered the coup de grâce. ‘These juxtapositions trace how oil wealth fuels both excess and dependency,’ Soleimani says, ‘and how the spectacle of sport can be used to obscure these entanglements.’
For Soleimani, sportswashing exploits the spectacle of sport to mask the crimes of the state, and so distract from the extractive and often violent systems underpinning the sports industrial complex: billion-dollar stadiums built by migrant labourers, construction that destroys native habitats and infrastructures financed by regimes with deep human rights abuses.’ In her work, she seeks to interrupt that spectacle, cut it up and see through it, and so reimagine its aesthetic and political values. Like all great protest placards, though, there is humour and warmth to be found in Soleimani’s pictures. In ‘Qatar World Cup Dairy [1]’ (2018), she has dressed up in the burnt burgundy and white strip of the Qatari football team and put on an oversized paper mask of the country’s Emir, Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, with her own beaming smile seen through a cut-out hole. Her works are playful and inventive, more interested in mocking the propaganda machine of the Gulf states than directly exposing the crimes that sportswashing is designed to cover up.
Bold gestures and body language are employed on the football field just as they are on the political rostrum, like a silent language designed to manipulate us into identifying with ‘individuals we’ve never met, yet invest with intense devotion,’ she says. ‘I think of body language identification and coaching as the astrology of professional culture, a supposedly universal code that promises to reveal power and authority.’ This perspective was especially prevalent in her exhibition ‘Levers of Power’ at Denny Dimin Gallery in New York in 2020, in which she isolated the gestures of politicians — focusing on just their hands — to prompt viewers to question the role of body language in popular media images. If monuments crystallise gestures of power, and can be read as gestural objects themselves, photographs of world leaders capture a different, fleeting register of political gesture… What happens when they become detached from their bodies and histories? What is the line between performance and political cosplay? Sometimes, it seems, not very much. As the flames of geopolitical unrest continue to be fanned across the Middle East, and the spectacle of sport continues to be kicked about like a political football, our task will be to distinguish between the game itself and the contentious politics with which it is now so often infected.
