Competitive Games trace their way back to ancient times. But Games are not just a vehicle to display personal prowess, talent and skill. Their inherent competitiveness fuels ambition, a desire to excel and win, sometimes using fair means or foul. 

The organization of international sporting events such as the Olympics as well as events such as the Commonwealth Games, or the World Cup (Cricket/Football) often become spectacular playgrounds for exposition of national pride as well as the establishment of much-needed sporting and cultural infrastructure. In times of economic distress or in the face of developmental backwardness, the validity of spending millions on sporting extravaganzas is also often questioned.

Card Deal! was conceptualized by Artcore as an exhibition of 52 artworks by artists from the East Midlands and India each. The exhibition, a part of Artcore’s Games People Play project, was especially designed for the One Year To Go!event being organized at Derby on July 27, 2011, to celebrate the year in anticipation of the London Olympics that opened on July 27, 2012.

Each artwork symbolized one week of the 52 weeks to go before the Games open. The exhibition also ironically played on the fact that there are 52 cards in a pack of playing cards (minus the jokers!), that the game of cards is NOT part of the Olympics, but it is extraordinarily popular with children as an indoor card game, with magicians (in fact most begin learning magic tricks with a pack of playing cards), with adults as in the intellectual stimulation provided by the game of Bridge as well as Solitaire, and of course world-wide for gambling! The exhibitions tried to present different points of views, attitudes and takes that artists have on games, their organization, on the players and the organizers, the spectators, the promoters and sponsors, the winners and the losers.

The exhibition was shown at various venues across the UK until the Olympics began.