Ruth Beraha: Football as a Space of Belonging and Identity

From 4 September to 10 October 2026, Alice Amati Gallery in London presents One Day, Out of the Blue, I Fell in Love with You, Ruth Beraha’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. The project stems from several months of research conducted by the Italian artist in football stadiums across Britain, where she observed the rituals, emotions and social dynamics of contemporary fan culture.

Football enters Beraha’s practice not simply as a subject, but as a space through which she explores some of the central concerns of her work: the relationship between the individual and the collective, the construction of identity, belonging, and the distinction between “us” and “them”. The stadium becomes a place where individual identities are both affirmed and dissolved into a collective voice, giving form to feelings of devotion, solidarity, rivalry, pride and hostility.

The project at Alice Amati brings together footage recorded at Women’s Super League matches with the voices and chants of supporters of Millwall Football Club, creating a physical and almost tactile portrait of collective participation. Images of young girls and supporters cheering, embracing, raising scarves and reacting to the game are accompanied by chants, shouting and swearing. The juxtaposition creates a tension between image and sound, revealing fandom as an experience that can be simultaneously intense, aggressive, humorous and deeply communal.

Alongside the video, Beraha presents a series of drawings focused on supporters and, in particular, on the recurring gesture of outstretched arms seen in football stadiums around the world. The figures are progressively reduced to bodies, torsos and gestures, becoming almost “collective bodies”: individual presences that also stand in for the many others who participate in the same ritual.

With One Day, Out of the Blue, I Fell in Love with You, Ruth Beraha extends a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, sound and performance, investigating the ambiguities of collective experience. Football fandom becomes a particularly revealing lens through which to examine these tensions: a phenomenon capable of bringing people together across social and cultural differences, while simultaneously creating boundaries, forms of belonging and exclusion. Football thus becomes a way of addressing a more universal desire—the need to belong to a community—and the tensions that every form of belonging inevitably produces.