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For Esmaa Mohamoud, growing up as the only girl between two older brothers and two younger ones, an engagement with sports was inevitable. A self-described tomboy, she played sports like a boy, wore a jersey, was a Raptors fan who admired Vince Carter and wanted some of his magic for her own. That is, until her mother insisted on dresses and Esmaa, even then squaring off on issues of gender and sports, stepped out in a dress, with a jersey over top.
"One of the Boys," a series she produced in 2017-19, addresses a range of issues, from Black men feeling the need to assert hyper-masculinity and eschewing any sign of vulnerability or fragility, to the underrepresentation of women in sports, to set definitions of gender and the searing associations she draws between athleticism and what she refers to as "neo-slavery." Basketball is the sport she knows best, but her work also engages football. In both she identifies unnerving parallels between these sports with largely Black athletes playing together on a team, linked or tied, as it were, to the necessity to be one of the gang. Directly, and without embellishment or lengthy verbal buttressing, she says,
"I saw a lot of parallels between contemporary forms of slavery, which I believe athleticism in the sport world is for Black people today, and historical forms of slavery."
There's an intended ambiguity or maybe a bifurcation in Esmaa Mohamoud's work. The wealth and glamour of being a sports star are weighed against the physical damage suffered and the indenture that comes with the job. There is an anomalous but not parodic apprehension in seeing a tall, wellmuscled basketball player, broad-shouldered and wasp-waisted, in a ballgown of satin and velvet, with hooped and crinolined skirts. The sense of frustrated or blocked achievement, of opportunities to participate and play and then the impediments thrown in the path, is evident throughout Mohamoud's work. You see it in Heavy Heavy (Hoop Dreams), 2016-17, where 60 solid but deflated cast concrete basketballs present as far from their intended function as does the piece I Am, 2015, an oversized basketball hoop made of fine chains, invisibly suspended from the ceiling at an inoperable height, the chains that make up the net trailing and...