OUTLAND

OUTLAND is a video, audio and water installation which is being prepared for the Malta Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale, 2019. It uses the myth of Calypso and Ulysses to reinterpret, in contemporary imagery and sound, the duality of the character of Calypso, as lover and oppressor, as she offers a haven for Ulysses during the seven years of his harbouring in her cave. It focuses on the indecisiveness of man as he longs to return to his original life, caught between the safety of an island and the peril of sea crossing.

Through multiple films, the installation explores the numbness and the lure of safety, the obsession of keeping someone hostage and the longing for freedom.

On OUTLAND film set

Credits for Outland

 Director:  Vince Briffa

Actors:   Paul Portelli, Sandra Mifsud

Poem:  Immanuel Mifsud

Voices:  Paul Portelli, Angele Galea

Music/Soundscape:  Michael Alcorn

Still Photography: Jon Wrigley

Video Cameraman: Jean Pierre Gatt

Drone photography: Edouard Tabone Demarco

Underwater photography: Enrique Talledo

Props: Vince Briffa, Aaron Bezzina, Matthew Galea

Post production: Vince Briffa

Colour grading: Jon Wrigley

Copyright: Vince Briffa

COLLABORATORS:

Heritage Malta

Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta

The Maritime Museum, Malta

The Museum of Archaeology, Malta

Malta Film Studios

IN TRANSIT

IN TRANSIT: Contemporary Media Art by Artists from Malta is a collective, travelling exhibition of contemporary media art by Maltese artists, focusing on the diverse applications of the digital medium, and curated by Vince Briffa. The exhibition presents a collection of works that establishes the variety of media art practices currently emerging from the Maltese islands. The exhibition is part of the cultural programme for the 2017 Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU and is also supported by Valletta 2018 European Capital of Culture.

VENUES & DATES

NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, Germany – 24 March to 16 April, 2017

Stadskantoor, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands – 8 May to 24 May, 2017

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Adrain Abela, Moira Agius, Victor Agius, Matthew Attard, Nigel Baldacchino, Aaron Bezzina, Kristina Borg, Trevor Borg, Kane Cali, Joseph Calleja & Jon Galea, Giola Cassar, Matthew Galea, Ritianne Muscat, Alexandra Pace, Matthew Schembri, Adrian Scicluna, Sarah Marie Scicluna, Darren Tanti, John Vella

Recent years have seen a sharp interest in the exploration of different relationships to digital technology by artistic disciplines and practices. This attraction has been primed by the reality that this new medium has not only produced art forms that are influenced by new media technologies, but has also created new art forms that exist because of such technologies.

Such a phenomenon is also reflected in Malta’s visual arts scene with a relatively small but consistent output of work, for the most part by a younger generation of artists, primarily in the area of video art, photography, sound installation, Internet art and interactive practices.

In Transit is an exhibition that affirms this interest by contemporary artists in the medium, not only from a technology standpoint, but also as a generator of content and concept. This exhibition acts as a snapshot of local media art sensibility within the broader, international perspective. In Transit showcases a variety of home-grown conceptual dialogues of relevance to an international audience, as they are individually interpreted and developed by the island’s up and coming artistic generation.

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SMALL AMNESIAS

A moving image work in reaction to Oliver Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time as part of Modern Music Days, Saturday 11 February, 2017, Teatru Manoel, Valletta.

“What the artist as collector, can reveal to the historian is the intrinsic contradiction in the objects: the contrast between function and the aesthetic values, the value of an intimate historical document, the possibility that a fragment re-intensifies a memory. This type of history does not necessarily have a line organisation.”

— http://www.um.es/vmca/download/docs/emanuela-saladini.pdf

Small Amnesias is an attempt to rediscover beauty in the memory of the forgotten.

It interweaves found[1] archive footage and extracted[2] poetic text to recontextualise meaning[3] and challenge the common notion of external beauty as the only genesis of happiness and joy.

Through the clashing of contradicting values, the work successively challenges and exalts the central theological theme in Oliver Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, that of religious devotion as the only hope in the tragedy of war, aspiring to unearth a further disquieting inner beauty.

[1] Medical and scientific footage from Prelinger Archives, Creative Commons.

[2] Text extracted from Beauty is the Mystery of Life by painter Agnes Martin, who explains that pure beauty can only be found when the artist is distanced from life and is devoted to an unhindered aesthetic abstraction.

[3] Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concern with history and the articulation of its significance to the present can be traced from his early writings, through to one of his final works, “On the Concept of History” (1939-1940), where he imagined the artist (and also the critic and historian) as an interpreter of history, establishing a “unique experience with the past”.

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BEJN SHAB U DUHHAN

BEJN SHAB U DUHHAN is a collaboration with philosopher Michael Zammit that started in 2011, following my exhibition TERRAIN VAGUE at St. James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity in Valletta, currently known as Spazju Kreattiv. It primarily features the paintings from that series, together with Michael's writing in reaction to the works, under the title of "Tryst: The Occult Encounter between Word (Vyashti) and World (Samashti)".

The book will be published by Delere Press of Singapore and will be available in December 2016.

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What Matter Who's Speaking

WHAT MATTER WHO'S SPEAKING is a publication in collaboration with writer Jonathan Bennett Bonilla which will be published by Delere Press of Singapore in early 2017. It will feature my ongoing series entitled RESIDUE.

The series reconsiders discarded traces of a work process, remnants salvaged from my studio. RESIDUE sits at the junction between painting and objet trouvé, and is an ongoing attempt at recontextualising materiality to create new meaning. Its maxim is the strict regime of modular reasoning - for a unit to be created, the rescued has to sit well within the frame of the jewel case.

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