A total of 100 artistically worked balls will go on show at the 'Ball Artists - Artists' Ball', which opens on Sunday, 29 January at the municipal museum on Horster Strasse. The exhibition, featuring works such as a mobile made of leather octagons, the Glow and Spike Ball, the luminous 'Universal Star' and adaptations of world-famous art entitled 'The Scream', will run until 12 March. "We were very surprised by the number of artists who are so on the ball when it comes to football", explained Ulrich Daduna, chairman of the Gelsenkirchen Art Society, which is staging the ball show.

In former Schalke player and artist Yves Eigenrauch the exhibition has a well-known patron. He is joined by Udo Dziersk, a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Both have contributed a work of their own to the exhibition. Dziersk came up with a "Cup Ball". The professor of art considered where the old ball had already been in use. "Perhaps in the club cup competition", he suspects. "Handmade" is the name Eigenrauch gave to his work. The disconnected leather sections, blackened on the inside and furnished with drawings of hand bones in white, are a reference to the sad circumstances in which many balls are manufactured, often with the use of child labour.

The exhibition itself, however, is being supported by the 'fair play - fair life' campaign, which promotes the use of fair trade balls. Accordingly, the 100 balls on show did not come straight off the shelf. They are 'played with' balls that had already been used by youth teams for training and league matches. The young footballers swapped the used balls for new fair trade ones supplied by the 'fair play - fair life' project, which campaigns for fair manufacturing conditions in producer countries such as Pakistan.

At the end of March the entertaining football exhibition will head for the region's other World Cup host cities of Cologne and Dortmund, before returning to the Gelsenkirchen museum for the World Cup itself. Once the tournament is over the balls will be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to an education, art and sport project in South Africa, host nation of the 2010 World Cup.

Gelsenkirchen Municipal Museum
Horster Strasse 5-7
45897 Gelsenkirchen
Telephone: +49 209/169-4361
Open Tuesday to Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm, admission free