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Culture Meets Sports - Martin Carlsson-Wall in an Art Talk with Fathia Mohidin

On April 6th, the Director for the Center for Sports and Business, Martin Carlsson-Wall, had an interesting and interactive art talk with the artist Fathia Mohidin where they discussed how art relates to sports.

The art talk took place in conjunction with the screening of Fathia Mohidin’s video work KIN on the big screen in the atrium in late March and early April at the Stockholm School of Economics. KIN investigates muscles as memory and the kinship with forefathers. 

During an hour-long art talk in the Jacob Dahlgren room at the Stockholm School of Economics, SSE researcher Martin Carlsson-Wall and artist Fathia Mohidin discussed the overarching theme of how sports does relate to art, the quantification of performance in sports (key thing is, for instance, watches, pulse measurement, how fast you run, measurement of training as well as nutrition), the boundary between work time and spare time, and how the progression of digitalization has created more blurriness between work and spare time, as well as how the gym can be seen as an illustration of one of today’s bigger societal issues, and the opportunities and problems it creates.

“Having a conversation about sports, economics, and art with Martin Carlsson-Wall and hearing the students’ reflections gave me several new perspectives on the topic. The conversations about, among other things, quantification and accounting in relation to sports and art showed several exciting similarities. Among other things, I take with me the reflections on the demarcation between work time and spare time, as well as memory as an accounting artifact into my own artistic research. I have both been inspired and learned a lot!”, says Fathia Mohidin.  

Martin Carlsson-Wall continues, "I learned a lot from combining insights from art and sport. Fathia Mohidin is a fascinating artist. Her work about the gym and how the body connects to memory and different senses gave me a lot to think about. In general, I think this type of "bubble-hopping" where you combine knowledge and networks from two different worlds is very inspiring."

Martin Carlsson-Wall (Director for Center for Sports and Business) and Fathia Mohidin 

More About Fathia Mohidin

In her art, Fathia Mohidin examines the gym as a specific place along with its aesthetics, architecture and politics. She is also interested in the demands for productivity and performance placed on us by capitalist society, and her work draws our attention to similarities between a gym and the workplace. 

In 2017, the artist began exercising regularly in order to investigate new ways of thinking and working with the body. It evolved into a form of physical research that has become the foundation of her artistic practice. 

Fathia Mohidin was the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation recipient of 2020.



Sports and Business