REVIEW Two local artists work from the “In-between”

Review /Malta / Exhibition

September - October 2022

MALTA

Continued

artist, the work and the viewer, nothing happens and the work remains inert in the spatial limbo of its existence.

As the exhibition’s curator, I have approached the work proposed by the two young artists for the exhbition In-Between from a stand that entertains the notion of this sentient gap (that is housed between the mask and the face) as a metaphor for the constricted breach of visual art practice, that is as the in-between gap sundering the germination of concept and its final exposition, an activity that transforms itself from the incubatory space of the studio to the heterotopic openness of the exhibition hall. These spaces of thinking and doing which contemporaneously shift between the actual and the virtual, act similarly to the enclosure brought about by parenthesis in a sentence, an afterthought designed to reflect back on the journey of the works from its beginning to its end. Therefore, my intention is for these works to be the space that activates such a mediation from a myriad of levels, becoming a conduit for making meaning of our contemporary condition.

In-Between is an exhibition that focuses on intermediate states, connecting and alternately separating such dualities such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the hidden, and the tangible and the intangible amongst many others. The two young Maltese artists, winners of the Shifting Contexts competition in 2018 organised by Agenzija Zghazagh in collaboration with Spazju Kreattiv and curated by Dr. Trevor Borg, have largely conceptualised the two bodies of work presented in the exhibition in the restraint of the personal void of lockdown, uncertain if the work will ever be exhibited and far removed from the normal custom where site specificity is usually factored into the creative process. Both artists have therefore had to renegotiate their installations not only from a spatial dimension, and a temporal one in the case of Matthew Schembri, in line with the ever-changing statistics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Malta.

Thomas Scerri’s body of sculptural work challenges our amodal properties through a process that zones in on the limen of fact and fabrication as it acts on resolutions at the thresholds of matter and material. Materja is a body of sculptural work that metaphorically resides in the constricted space between the mask and the face and reflects on the in-between state through intentional material ambiguity. The artist hides the metal sculptures behind fabric and challenges us to consciously experience the form from its evanescent silhouette, cutting us off from any visual truth and denying any likelihood of activating our amodal faculties. Scerri consciously suspends the works in a multitude of layers of uncertainty, provoking their conceptual reading and challenging our meaning-making structures through an exacted strategy of ambivalence. His masked, inert forms defy gravity and hang in mid-air to conceptually allude to the void that follows the transience of life, suspended in the abyss of the hereafter. Through their display aesthetics, these shrouds, silently draped in their own veiled uncertainty, boldly question the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

Through a deliberately unsettling process, Thomas positions the viewer in a state of anxiety. Planned lighting suggests our spatial understanding of the combined mixture of materials, plays with our perceptions, and invites us to only make sense of their form through our own visual perception. Like a modesty screen, the veiling material cuts into the shared space between us and the work, impending further approach while paradoxically luring us into its uncomfortable, suggestive embrace. There is an uncanny quality in Scerri’s works, as we are placed in an an uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance5; we are suspended between what we hold to be true and what we know to be true, triggering a Lacanian notion of uncertainty, of not being able to distinguish the

5Art and Popular Culture, Cognitive Dissonance, http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Cognitive_dissonance

terrible from the sublime, uncertain if the exhibits repel or draw us into their mysterious gulf. Materja’s uncertainty does not emanate from what is evident nor does it come from what is completely unknown; it is brought about by what is suggested, by the anxiety of what we project onto what could possibly be encountered.

A similar concern on the anxiety of the unknown is shared by Matthew Schembri’s installation what you left behind, an installation which focuses on the way we perceive virus contagion. The work appropriates traces of evidence of social engagement through fingerprints and other marks that visitors leave on wine glasses when departing the art exhibition space after the opening night. In a quasi-forensic fashion, the work uncovers a world hidden from our sight and only made manifest through ultraviolet light. Similar to Scerri’s installation, what you left behind makes us imagine what is not visually evident, as it shockingly unearths the hidden world of the transmission and infection of a virus through touch, and the perils at stake when we make social contact with others during public occasions. what you left behind is both a performance and an installation. It uses the vernissage of the same work as a superspreading event to bring to our attention our vulnerability to what we do not see. Those invited to the exhibition’s opening are given wine in glasses that are partly covered in a chemical powder that is not visible to the naked eye. This acts as agent to make the guests’ fingerprints on the glasses visible, which, when emptied, are placed on UV-lit racks which line the adjoining exhibition space. The glasses are a living testimony to the multiple perils of virus transmission through human touch and become a metaThere is a sense of the uncanny in the work what you left behind, as it is with us, present, but yet, does not make its appearance known through the faculty of any of our senses. Spread between two different spaces, what you left behind creates panic in the mind of the viewer as soon as they are in the second room, when they realise that the more than seven hundred and fifty glasses infected by human touch, can not only be potentially virus-infected, forcing us to rethink our age-old formats of hospitality, social entertainment and societal engagement. The work is a true wakeup call to the realisation that there is another world far removed from our faculties of vision, a realm inhabited by invisible invaders that wreak havoc on our bodies and could potentially kill us.

phor for the ever-increasing number of COVID-19-pandemic-related deaths on the island. As we increasingly return to whatever we describe as normality, in search of an unrestrained, full life, one cannot but help but think about how viruses challenge our concept of what living means through their uncanny state; in abeyance between the living and non-living, they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells. Furthermore, they can profoundly affect their hosts’ behaviour6 . Both Materja and what you left behind heavily rely on light to tease out alternative meanings of our universal truths. They use different qualities of light as metaphors for the metaphysical abstractions of existence, life and death. Similar to Blumenberg’s philosophic musings on light in his essay Light as a Metaphor for Truth (1957)7, the use of light in the exhibition is intrusive; in its abundance, it creates the overwhelming, conspicuous clarity with which the truth “comes forth”. In Blumenberg’s own words, In-Between uses light as the absolute power of Being, which reveals the paltriness [Nichtigkeit] of the dark, which can no longer exist once light has come into existence.

One hopes that the viewer in this exhibition is touched by the light and finds some truth in its suggestive illumination.

6Scientific American, Are Viruses Alive? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/ 7Hans Blumenberg, Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation, in David Kleinberg-Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. The University of California Press. pp. 30--62 (1993)