PHOTOGRAPHY Images linking past and present at Spazju Kreattiv

Spotlight /Exhibition / Malta

November - December 2021

MALTA

MARGERITA PULÈ

A PLAYGROUND OF IMAGES LINKING PAST AND PRESENT

Untitled (Past Continuous), 2021. Alex Urso ®

A new body of work by artist Alex Urso . takes the Magna Zmien archive as a point of departure for a period of investigation into the meaning of the archival process, as well as into the relevance of the archive to disparate generations.

. T . he Magna Zmien Foundation has a mission to digitise analogue Maltese audio-visual material (8mm films, slides, photographs, negatives, and audio tapes), giving individuals and communities access to previously lost images, sounds and narratives. Once this material is made digital, it will be stored on the Magna Zmien server, made available to artists and researchers. This . year, Magna Zmien reached out to Italian artist Alex Urso, who has already exhibited in Malta, to create an exhibition that could bridge the gap between generations. In parallel, sound artist Yasmin Kuymizakis (who has previously engaged with the archive’s content) was invited to create two sound installations from archival recordings.

MARGERITA PULÈ is an artist, writer and curator, with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, and founder of Unfinished Art Space. Her practice and research are concerned with the contradictions of politics and social realities.

Untitled (Past Continuous), 2021. Alex Urso ®

Thus, Past Continuous was born – an exhibition that transforms the archive of 20th century material into a children’s ‘playground’ experience, featuring a new set of augmented reality collages, immersive projections and an installation of 900 paper blocks.

When asked to make an archive more accessible to audiences, an artist will often turn to digital technologies, working with gamification or interactivity to capture attention. Here, however, Urso took a different approach. His process leant materiality to the digital content, and through his installations, he endowed a three-dimensionality to two-dimensional images. The analogue-come-digitised image has again been made paper, which itself, interacts with the digital.

Urso’s first series of works consists of several silhouettes in reverse; figures are erased from photographs to whiteness in their place. Using an augmented reality tool, the viewer can scan the image to reveal a digital version of the figures that were once in the image. These images are ephemeral: as soon as the device is moved the image disappears, leaving only an empty silhouette behind. The figures – children, parents, grandparents, and even the family dog – juxtapositioning that Urso has employed confounds historical and linear time, placing unrelated images from disparate times next to each other.

Urso has long-engaged with archival material in his practice, often creating surreally beautiful scenes through intricate collage and diorama-making. His practice also engages with non-formal archival material, such as abandoned artworks or photographs, and employs a quasi-archaeological process of re-creation, verging on resurrection. Here, he has created four of his signature three-dimensional collages. Small worlds-in-a-box combine elements from the archives; people, landscapes, seascapes, to create fragmentary scenes, within semi-surreal worlds. The viewer is invited to explore these intimate ‘theatres’, which bring together a collection of individual viewpoints within fragments of archival images.

Magna Zmien has been active since 2017, when it was formed by researcher and musician Andrew Alamango and a team that includes archivist and ethnomusicologist Andrew Pace. Its activities in recent years have made it apparent that a large amount of material remains hidden in analogue formats, awaiting digitisation and rediscovery. We will continue to work to make this material available to artists and researchers, allowing for the reinterpretation and recontextualization of archival material that belongs to us all.

have been taken from many different collections and are not placed in chronological or genealogical order. However, through their placement, the hidden characters develop relationships between each other; a boy from the very early 20th century mirrors the pose of a boy of a similar age from the 1980s, while temporary familial bonds are forged through the grouping of varied images.

. A series of looped film extracts, also taken from Magna Zmien’s archive, are placed alongside these images. The extracts show glimpses of lives lived; smiling families, waving children, holiday scenes, in a multiplicity of moving images. Through Kuymizakis’ accompanying sound reel of children’s voices speaking to relatives abroad, the multisensorial space is heightened, drawing the viewer into an immersive space.

Urso has placed a mass of paper cubes within the exhibition space, each individually signed and made from a different image from the archive. The 900 cubes recall both the building blocks of childhood as well as the pixels of a digital image. Together they form an installation that invites the viewer’s interaction. Here again, the process of selection and Past Continuous, a solo show by Alex Urso, is on at Spazju Kreattiv until Sunday 5 December 2021. The exhibition is curated by Margerita Pulè, with sound contribution by Yasmin Kuymizakis. The exhibition is part of the Spazju Kreattiv Pro . . gramme 2021/2022 and the ZiguZajg International Arts Festival for Children and Young People, and was made possible through Urso’s two-week residency at Valletta Design Cluster.

Untitled (Past Continuous), 2021. Alex Urso ®

“The process of selection and juxtapositioning confounds historical and linear time, placing unrelated images from disparate times and contexts alongside each other.”