Paul Pfeiffer and Edgar Davids
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About the artwork
Crowds and Power is a sound installation by American artist Paul Pfeiffer and former Dutch footballer and photographic artist Edgar Davids. The tunnel marks the entry point into the exhibition – a passage where sound, vibration and light transport you into the world between the locker room and the pitch.
The sound is drawn from a mix of recordings from the player’s point of view – from the roar of the fans to different football songs and chants. The installation takes inspiration from iconic stadiums like San Siro (Milan) as well as the sound of cinematic battle scenes like the Lord of the Rings to explore the anticipation and adrenaline-rush of stepping onto the pitch, as well as the mental and emotional journey of individual football players.
Pfeiffer’s practice explores systems of spectacle, celebrity and society. He works with images to reveal themes like adoration, objectification and myth-making embedded in mass media. In collaboration with Davids, this work explores the world of the tunnel and the perspective of the player, while centring the crowd as a protagonist in its own right. It puts the viewer into a space where identity, nationhood, freedom and creativity are performed and reimagined.
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Football City, Art United. at Manchester International Festival 2025. Photography by David Levene.
About the pairings
Edgar Davids
Edgar Davids is an iconic Dutch footballer, celebrated for his fierce competitiveness, creative flair, distinctive style — and his legendary goggles. After rising to fame with Ajax, he went on to star for AC Milan, Juventus, Barcelona, Inter Milan, and Tottenham Hotspur, winning numerous domestic and international titles along the way. Beyond his achievements on the pitch, Davids has made a profound impact off it. Through his foundation work, he has harnessed his influence, and the power of street soccer, to foster community cohesion, bring youth back to school, and create pathways to employment. He is the founder of Monta, the world’s first dedicated street soccer brand, and the founder of Parc des Rêves, a global initiative building playgrounds in underserved neighbourhoods to inspire and empower the next generation through play.
Paul Pfeiffer
Paul Pfeiffer is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer's objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness. He has presented work in major international exhibitions, such as the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His first large-scale retrospective toured the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023-24); Guggenheim Bilbao (2024); and The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (on view now through August 31, 2025.
Credits
Audio Recording and Post Production Julian Zehnder
Acoustics, Speaker Layout and Engineering Keegan Curran
Light Design Prema Mehta
Exhibition Management Kevin Reuning
Production Management Rudy Gerson
Further Recordists Shari DeLorian, Federica Furlani, Domiziano Maselli, Tommaso Zerbini, Emilio Pozzolini
Pfeiffer Studio New York Candela Bado, Carlos Galek Sefchovich, Kevin Reuning, Cori Spencer, Julian Zehnder
Special Thanks Thomas Dane Gallery, Tom Dingle, Covey Gong , Martino Rimoldi, Federica Sheehan
Football City, Art United.
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