Victory

Image Courtesy: Mivan Makia

Image Courtesy: Nathaniel Enriquez

Image Courtesy: Ruba Al Sweel

Image Courtesy: Nathaniel Enriquez

Image Courtesy: Hady Afif

Image Courtesy: Mivan Makia

Precision Football
Dubai, UAE
22 February, 2026

Victory: to bend, to tie, to overcome.

The Referee

In Seren Metcalfe’s painting, a referee recalls an omnipresent father figure, supposedly preventing physical harm in a game whose historical precedents had often culminated in the death of one of two rival armies in a spectacle of warfare. An arbiter of prohibition and temptation – ‘he’ is a body, a camera and an architecture, here to sustain the very foundations of competition and the credibility of the game, to mitigate primordial desire to deviate – to even touch the ball.

The Teams

Emerging from Eduardo Cassina’s banner is a magnified image of moss, which he took under a UV torch in Aotearoa New Zealand. Forging an ancient kinship between botanic and fungal kingdoms, mosses were among the first plants to colonise land over 450 million years ago. They did not do this alone. Early land plants formed crucial, symbiotic relationships with fungi to survive the harsh, barren terrains.

Continuing to sustain life together, fungi break down rock and provide nutrients, while mosses provide carbon through photosynthesis and create moisture-retaining habitats. They work together to build soil, making life possible for all subsequent plants, insects, and animals. With the survival of one inherently tied to the survival of the other, the foundation of the living world viewed through the moss is not competition or transactional symbiosis, but allyship.

The Crowd

“We join crowds because located there, in the midst of all that commotion and movement, is something fundamental about what it is to be human. We are swept along on an emotional tide, fired up and inspired by our fellow travellers. Our individual failings are submerged: we become greater than the sum of our meagre parts.” ¹ — Dan Hancox

Competitive sport–football foremost amongst them–gains its popularity from the ‘massification of society’ that radiates through urban and media infrastructures. To Jean-Marie Brohm, “the sporting institution is a key element of the liberal-capitalist system. Clubs, the basic units of this institution, function effectively as competing enterprises.” ² Implicated at such economic and spatial scale, stadiums arise within the city to sanction, monetise and contain supposedly primal adversarial tendencies. The crowd blends into architecture, into an inward-facing ring, into a muffled mass voice. Yet, there is joy in crowds, a sliver of civic potential, a gathering of voices actualised as image, synchronised gesture, a cheer here and a chant there not predicated on the binary of loss.

In this spirit, Low Hazard is pleased to hold Victory, a group exhibition unfolding amidst the UAE Women’s League match between Precision and DXB FC, on 22 February, 2026 at Precision Football, Ibn Batuta Mall, Dubai.

Featuring a series of banners (by Assi Abogado via Relic Suspension, Eduardo Cassina, Homme FC, Omar Sha3 and Rowan Kelly and Verity Monroe), megaphones (by Abdulla Alkindi, Farah Al Qasimi, Hady Afif, Mivan Makia, Nathaniel Enriquez, Rashed Qurwash Ruba Al Sweel and Sarah Brahim), pom poms (by Laila Majid), jerseys (by XXXtremesports) as well as a painting (by Seren Metcalf) and a zine (by Carla Recover), the works that comprise the exhibition are activated by the crowd-as-performer with a choreographic intervention (by Juline Hadaya), to celebrate both teams on the pitch.

1 Dan Hancox, Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (London: Verso, 2024).
2 Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time, trans. Ian Fraser (London: Ink Links, 1978).

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