Disgha

Site specific art intervention and book by Austin Camilleri turned into an epic documentation of Valletta that spanned 29 years.

Most of the photographs in the exhibition are taken from the book Vanishing Valletta, published in 2018, a sort of Maltese equivalent of the book Paris Perdu. Thirty original prints from this series are held in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The exhibition will present an equivalent number of selenium and/or gold-toned silver prints made by the photographer. The publication titled The Black Rose consists of a collection of anecdotes about Strait Street and The Gut and including a limited-edition print.

David Pisani’s photographic work can be summed up as a relentless pursuit of the sublime and the erotic. His earliest works (c. 1980’s) already showed a deep concern with the representation of the human body, the erotic nature of places and objects as fetishism and the inevitable association to sexuality and death; themes which are consistently present in all his work.

Disgha is a site specific art intervention across the Maltese islands. The work consists of verses from 9 different poems by 9 different Maltese authors engraved on different sites and rock formations across the islands, effectively creating a land constellation across the territory. The verses, all engraved using a purposelycreated Maltese font, focus on the transient nature of the work itself and are a reaction to the current environmental situation and an attempt in blurring the lines between permanence, impermanence and memory. Most of the engravings perished or eroded in time, making the publication the only testimony of this art installation. The book about the project is produced in large format is designed by the artist himself, and may be considered as an extension of the project. Text in the book is by Rosa Martinez, Alex Torpiano, and Immanuel Mifsud and photography by Daniel Cilia.

For more information: www.austin-camilleri.squarespace.com/disgha-1

The link between decay and architecture is most evident in his photographic essay on the city of Valletta and the red-light district of Strait Street entitled ‘Vanishing Valletta’ which was first exhibited in Paris in 1996 during the Biennale of photography: Mois de la Photo à Paris under the title “La Valette et le Grand Port – Portrait d’une Capitale Maritime”. In the year 2000 a selection of the Vanishing Valletta archive was included in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Pisani has also produced photo essays on the city of Dubai, the conflict zones in Cyprus and the city of Kyoto in Japan.

The exhibition, The Black Rose, runs until the 25th of June at the Adrian Bondy Galerie, Paris.