Artist: Ruth Beraha

Alice Amati presents the first solo show in London of Italian artist Ruth Beraha, featuring a new body of works which she developed out of months of research into UK football culture. The exhibition'One day, out of the blue, I fell in love with you' will be accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by writer and art critic Orit Gat.

For Beraha, football is not a subject to be observed from afar but a lived experience that has shaped her understanding of belonging, identity, and collective life since young adulthood. Her first solo exhibition in London emerges from months spent attending football matches across the United Kingdom, immersing herself in the rituals, emotions, and social dynamics of contemporary fan culture here. Beraha understands the stadium as a symbolic space where individual identities are affirmed and dissolved into a collective voice, and where the emotions of devotion, solidarity, rivalry, pride, and hostility become a lens through which to understand the world.

These concerns have long been central to Beraha's practice, which, spanning from sculpture, drawing, sound and performance, explores the shifting relationship between the individual and the collective, between "us" and "them," and the ways in which ideas of belonging and otherness are constructed. Football fandom offers a particularly revealing vantage point from which to examine these tensions: a space capable of bringing people together across social, cultural, and political backgrounds, while also drawing boundaries and producing exclusion. Looking at football supporters in Britain, Beraha continues her investigation into the ambivalent nature of collective identity, revealing fandom not simply as a cultural phenomenon but as a reflection of the universal desire to belong—and of the divisions that such belonging inevitably creates.In Ruth Beraha’s work, what you are looking at is footage of football fans in Women’s Super League games, the top-tier of women’s football in England, the division Arsenal Women play in. What you are hearing are fans of Millwall Football Club, a South London team with a reputation.

The audio is tactile, cacophonous, intense. And then there is all the swearing. ‘Fuck em all’ and ‘Where the fuck were you when you were bad’. The sound is loud, the voices aggressive. The images? Little girls looking at each as they cheer players on. A woman dancing. Two men looking at each other and breaking out in a smile at what they’ve just seen. My favourites are the arms outstretched, the scarves raised. The coming together. The lips scrunching in oohs and aahs. And the way synchronicity happens with the audiotrack: at some point, someone in the background chants, ‘I wanna go home’. Amidst all the intensity, fandom can be humorous, irreverent. The force of habit: when you watch something week in, week out, a part of you seeps into it too – aggression, emotion, humour.

You are watching people watching other people doing something they are amazing at. And upstairs, the drawings populate the gallery further. Those stretched, open arms: a gesture universally enacted in pitches everywhere. The repetition of this in the drawings, the way people in them become just bodies, torsos, arms extended, they are stand-ins for the others like them. They are there every week. The drawings echo another aspect of the sport: narrative and representation. A game is contained in 90 minutes. Its imagery lasts: The photograph of Brandi Chastain in her sports bra having taken off her shirt after winning the World Cup for the US in 1999. The Dick, Kerr Ladies team in 1920 in a striped kit and 1920s bobs under their hats. Chloe Kelly waving her shirt above her head after scoring the match-winning goal for England in the Euro 2022 final. The drawings, like images, explore what lasts. What stays after the game ends: in memory, in affect.- Extract from Orit Gat essay.