Past! Present. Future? (book)/Cluster 4
4. Remembering the Future: Towards a Historiography of Digital Art in Malta
Fondazzjoni Kreattività first meaningful engagement with Digital Art starts in 2005. It was that year that Vince Briffa produced Digital Discourse. This exhibition brought together nine artists from a number of Commonwealth countries, including Malta, as part of the CHOGM gathering held in Malta that year.
That exhibition has a number of antecedents in Malta as far as Digital Art is concerned. Most of these go back to Briffa’s own work with video art dating back to the 1990s. This genealogical line leads to the Larger Than Life installation by Norbert Francis Attard, This work by Attard was exhibited along with another by Briffa at the 1999 Venice Biennale, where Malta held a pavilion after a long absence from this long-standing art international exhibition. Larger Than Life was originally installed within the upper floor of St James Cavalier in 1998, just a few weeks after it had been vacated by the Government Printing Press but some weeks before Richard England started leading the transformation of the building into what eventually became Malta’s National Centre for Creativity.
Attard continued to create video art over the subsequent years, frequently engaging with digital technology to produce his works. This is most evident in the digital animation Metawarphosis (2003), which was eventually exhibited during the retrospective exhibition of Digital Art in Malta presented in 2018. Many of the works in this section revolve around that exhibition, including two other works by Attard from 2008, which are closely related to each other. The first is the public art installation, which featured blown up digital photos placed around the archades that previously constituted Freedom Square, on the west side of St James Cavalier. Attard also produced a video from this installation, which was exhibited at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity. He donated copies of these videos and documents pertaining to this piece to Spazju Kreattiv in 2018, for Remembering the Future.
This donation by Attard is not only useful in the overt sense that the collection has been enriched with yet more acquisition, but it also helps the organisation think carefully about the preservation of contemporary art, and particularly digital art. This in itself deserves a full study that could result in a separate book. It is an area that requires great attention, and Spazju Kreattiv is well positioned to be one of the leader on this discussion at a national level. Such considerations need to be done historically as well as within a broader context of the development of Digital Art in Malta and elsewhere.
One possibile genealogy of Digital Art in Malta leads back all the way to the 1970s and the work of Caesar Attard. This lineage is documented in the book art pieces produced by Attard in the series Folji, which contain evidence of the earliest known performance works and installations by Maltese artists. Some of Attard’s concepts in his works from that era, foreshadow a number of concepts that have become commonplace with Digital Art, such as interactivity, generativity, outputs generated by predetermined algorithms, and works based on instructions, which in turn harken back to an earlier avantgarde practice, seen through the likes of Fluxus, which was quite rare on the Maltese art scene throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, especially judging from the very few publicly accessible documents that have survived from this period.
Attard’s own work eventually leads to 2012’s H-ardcore. Arguably, it is Pierre Portelli who has brought this type of work to the fore beyond Attard. Portelli is among the members of the now-defunct Start contemporary art group who engaged in installation works in Malta since before the turn of the 21st century. Portelli’s works have been exhibited at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, among other places, a number of times over the years. It is also why he was the natural selection for the organisation in presenting its twentieth anniversary installation XX.
As far as the Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection is concerned, there’s very little of Portelli’s work that can really be acquired for long-term preservation with an eye on repeat exhibition. The nature of the work is ontologically different from the dominant visual art forms that permeate the collection: paintings, drawings, photographic works, and a broad range of relatively static sculptural pieces. The inclusion of a significant video document from Portelli’s collaboration with composer Albert Garzia for 2010’s Spoke’s is possibly the closest the collection can get to containing any of the works exhibited by this artist within Malta’s National Centre for Creativity. The same line of reasoning works for his earlier installation Grey Matter (2008) too, which is less evidently performance-based and therefore not immediately recognisable as a work of time-based art.
This also highlights the problematic nature of preserving works that consist of variable media. Fondazzjoni Kreattività has deliberately acquired a number of these types of works since 2017; more on these pieces shortly. The intention of including such works in the collection is to emphasize the need to rethink the traditional acquisition and preservation methods long-established for Malta’s national art collection. It also highlights how crucial the systematic archiving of documents arising from the creation and presentation of such works is to the better understanding of such pieces, when they are removed, sometimes most substantially, from the original context in which they were presented.
Such documents are sometimes conflated with the work itself. This is the case for Breathe (2010) by Romina Delia, acquired for Remembering the Future in 2018 but originally exhibited at an exhibition by women artists at Lascaris Wharf in Valletta some years earlier. The video art piece itself consists of a visual document of a private performance by Delia.
Other documents gathered for Remembering the Future in 2018 help enable the creation of a historiography for Digital Art in Malta. They are presented in this section as part of this potential narrative based on the initial research conducted specifically to raise the point about the need for a Digital Art history that can be referred to relatively easily to ensure that subsequent historical evaluations of Digital Art in Malta have a significant starting point, even if they decide to go elsewhere with their initial findings.
Since 2017 there has been at least one work of art that falls within the Digital Art category exhibited at Spazju Kreattiv, which was subsequently added permanently to the Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection. Starting with Mario Abela’s 2017 Dislocated Geographies exhibition, the collection was not only expanded by the inclusion of his digital manipulation of the famous Yalta image but also with the inclusion of a digital video piece containing a sound piece created by the artist specifically for this exhibition.
This was followed by Matthew Schembri’s 'The Crucifix' which entered the collection after it was exhibited during DRHA 2018 as part of Remembering the Future. Schembri has produced a subtle work of Digital Art not only in the visual impact of this work consisting ostensibly of a plaster crucifix attached to a Facebook logo as it would to a traditional cross but, more importantly, including also a mobile phone on which the public can send text messages to interact with the crucifix on its Facebook page.
The most recent (at the time of writing) work to enter the collection in this category is Floating Memorial by James Micallef Grimaud. This artist is best known for his public murals and other street art, even if he is rather prolific in the forms he picks for his creations. From for his 2019 exhibition A State of Limbo the collection has also taken in a set of prints from the same show. This approach is similar to that exercised by Spazju Kreattiv with Mario Abela. The curatorial intention here is to enable some contextual presentation of the Digital Art pieces along with other works by the artist and not only documents about the work itself, whenever possible.