Painting, music and football are set to form a winning team

TWO Russian painters, an Irish flautist and a Dutch video artist, in a collision between visual art, music and football? It's an unlikely sounding collaboration, but that's what's on offer at a unique charity event in Edinburgh tomorrow.

• The Homeless World Cup has grown from a modest event to one which now includes about 70 nations. Picture: Mark Dadswell/Getty Images

Visitors to the opening of a five-day exhibition at the Roxy Art House by the Edinburgh-based Russian painter and designer Maria Rud and her life-long friend and fellow artist Natalia Kharina will be able to watch the pair creating a new painting on the spot, to a semi-improvised accompaniment from Irish musician and singer Nuala Kennedy. As the painting takes shape – on glass – it will be projected on to a large screen, becoming real-time art. The proceeds from this will help fund another unique event, the Homeless World Cup, an annual international football tournament which helps the dispossessed to change their lives.

The participants have christened the event Art AnimOtion, For Rud – the Moscow-born artist who co-founded the sadly defunct DOM gallery and creative space in Edinburgh's Advocate's Close and its associated retail and design company Kindom – the seemingly disparate strands of painting, music and football aren't so far removed.

She believes that visual art and music have become too divorced from each other, and she points to combined exhibitions and concerts which DOM has run, both in its gallery and in larger spaces such as St Giles Cathedral and York Minster. Both art forms, she suggests, are intuitive, "but they have become very separate, and today we have concert halls and exhibition halls, and it's quite a sterile environment. But my mother was a composer and music was part of my life when I was growing up, so I think the idea of collaborating with musicians is very important."

As for the football charity, established by Mel Young, the Edinburgh-based co-founder of The Big Issue in Scotland, she argues that it has more in common with art than one might think: "They both inspire, enrich and reach out."

Rud, a petite figure with extravagant hair and a penchant for large dogs, has no qualms about painting under the spotlight. She and Kharina, whom she has known since childhood – in fact, she insists, "before we were born", for their parents were close friends – were students together at Moscow's Surikov School of Art and used to sketch on the streets, where it didn't do to be self-conscious: "You were constantly outside painting, with a crowd of people watching you." Rud's distinctive, vividly-hued paintings are inhabited by enigmatic, mythic-looking figures, somewhere between religious icons and the Russian avant garde. She has also worked in animation, as has Kharina, who is travelling from Moscow for the event. As the pair of them paint together on a plate of glass (Rud reckons they know each other well enough to avoid a stylistic car crash), they will be filmed by the Dutch video artist Mettje Hunneman, with the emerging painting projected on to a screen for the benefit of the audience, who will be able to purchase paintings and prints, the profits of which will go to the football charity. Another video maker, Paolo Drusi from Italy, will record the whole event.

For Nuala Kennedy, playing flute and singing as the two Russians paint presents an intriguing prospect, although she also claims a degree of common ground: the Dundalk-born musician first came to her adopted city to attend Edinburgh College of Art. "I've never done anything like this before," she says after a rehearsal with Rud. "It's a really powerful, immediate statement."

The flautist's newly released album Tune In combines traditional music with such contemporary elements as French flamenco guitarist Philippe Guidat, Scots jazz musicians Brian Kellock and Ryan Quigley, and Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake. But she says she won't be venturing into any contemporary jazz-style improvisation on the night, instead drawing on more traditional repertoire pieces. She adds: "I might remember fragments from an earlier rehearsal and some keys that worked better than others, and at a certain point there's a traditional song about the sea, from Donegal, that I'll sing. At the same time I'm trying not to plan too much."

Kennedy would like to develop the project in the future, possibly using electronics. Mel Young, too, sees Thursday's event as the potential start of something wider. "Involving the artistic community in what we're doing is worth exploring," he says. "I love the idea of Nuala, whose music I really like, and Maria, whom I've known for a long time, collaborating with others. That's what I like about creative people: they're prepared to take risks and see what happens."

Having set up The Big Issue in Scotland with Tricia Hughes in 1993, Young was in Cape Town in 2001, attending a conference of the International Network of Street Papers, of which he's president, when, over a few beers, he and an Austrian colleague came up with the improbable-sounding idea of an international football league for homeless people. "We were looking at the possibility of exchanging vendors, but then we thought there could be problems with visas, employment law, language… then we thought, well there is an international language, and its called football."

The first Homeless World Cup championship was played in Graz, Austria, with 18 countries participating. Since then the event has expanded phenomenally, with more than 70 countries now involved, According to the organisers, more than 70 per cent of the participants have come off drug and alcohol habits and moved on into employment and settled lives.

This year's final will be played in Rio de Janeiro in September. Young adds: "Our main fundraising effort is to get the teams there, but the event we're doing with Maria and Nuala is to support projects on the ground, in Africa and South America and other places which don't have any money whatsoever. Some of the people don't even have shoes or footballs."

Of the Roxy Art House event, he says: "It may seem a crazy idea, but when I started the Homeless World Cup, people said I'd finally gone completely mad, yet it's been a great success."

&149 Art AnimOtion is at the Roxy Art House, Edinburgh, from tomorrow until 10 May. For further details: www.mariarud.com; www.homeless worldcup.org; www.roxyarthouse.org (0131 6290039)