Past! Present. Future? (book)/Cluster 6

The Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection acquired an international dimension from the outset, back in 2000. This was when Apollo 5 (TK) by Victor Pasmore was brought to the renovated St James Cavalier by Richard England to be exhibited permanently in its theatre foyer. <<ADD A SENTENCE ABOUT APOLLO 5 AND ANOTHER ABOUT PASMORE’S RELEVANCE TO THE LOCAL SCENE>>

Malta’s National Centre for Creativity was not planned as a museum. Nor did the organisation ever develop an art acquisition policy beyond what was already established in the public sector when it was originally founded. This has led to a significant gap in the collection after the accession of Pasmore’s work into it in terms of works by internationally established artists. Works by both Damien Hurst and Antony Gormley were exhibited at the St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in 2002 (TK) but at no point is there any evidence of any desire to acquire any of their works for Malta’s national art collection.

Following the change in the basic manner of acquisition in 2016, the Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection started receiving some works by internationally significant artists, who deliberately selected for the Spazju Kreattiv programme in a curatorial effort to capture specific types of art of the collection. Although new acquisitions for the Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection are still firmly associated with the organisation’s exhibition programme for St James Cavalier, there seems to be a shift, albeit relatively minor, towards acquiring certain types of art. (SEE CLUSTER 4 FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF THE THEMATIC THREAD CONNECTING WORKS BY ABELA, SCHEMBRI, AND MICALLEF GRIMAUD)

The programme for the 3rd edition of the Valletta International Visual Arts (VIVA) festival in 2017, included Billy X Curmano. This American artist has produced performance art for five decades and thus brought a wealth of art making experience with him to the festival along with the work he showed during the VIVA festival. Curmano’s Honor the Hidden and Collected Waters (2017) stems from a durational piece he worked on for 25 years, during which he swam the entire length of the Mississippi River in the United States. He brought a numbered vial of water from the Mississippi River to donate to the Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection as part of the piece he was presenting at the VIVA festival. In the Malta performance, he worked closely with hydrologist Marco Cremona to gather weather from various places around Malta. He then performed a ritual at the official opening of the festival where he mixed a drop of each of the water samples he gathered from around the island with a drop of water from the Mississippi vial. The flasks containing the water samples and the mix from the performance where also donated by the art to Fondazzjoni Kreattività, along with a video produced as both a document and as an integral part of the ensuing exhibition of the work after the performance.

This type of work goes falls within the same category as the type of contemporary installations described in CLUSTER 4 in terms of variable media preservation. Curmano’s work is particularly complex because it contains both perishable elements (i.e. the water samples) as well as a video that needs eventually needs to be migrated from its present carrier to ensure that it remains accessible and playable both as a document and as (part of) a work of art in itself. These considerations need to be firmly grasped by the community of conservators who care for Malta’s National Art Collection. Presently there are only a few works of this type in the national collection – at Fondazzjoni Kreattività and elsewhere – but it is very likely that the collection will soon enough contain more works than one dedicated curator can realistically focus on. This type of work, therefore, needs to be considered as a rising concern as far as the future care of the collection is concerned.

Remaining with the realm of work of an immediate beyond Malta’s art scene, this section/CLUSTER contains works by three artists from China. This in itself deserves a particular study as it anticipates a growing interest on an international level, which Malta has only started contending with in recent years. The rise of China as a global economic power, along with the modernization of its political dealings with other nations, necessitates that more attention is also give to the art emanating from that country.

While the art scene in China is evidently far from homogenous, it does build on a system that has historically been fairly rigid and unlike that familiar to so-called Western realities. The main social difference lies in the recent rise of the individual artist’s style in as much as works produced in the current era demonstrate. It is only relatively recently that works by artists from China are not necessarily instantly recognizable as Chinese. This is because although conventional techniques are evident in some way or other in most artists’ body of work, there is a move to express personal creativity beyond the historically conventional processes.

Exhibiting the work of He Ping as part of the Spazju Kreattiv 2016/17 (TK) during the 3rd edition of the VIVA festival meant that Malta experienced its first major exhibition of non-traditional art from China. While even what is broadly known as abstract art had previously appeared in Malta from China, Ping’s work was the first time that one of Malta’s public cultural organisations presented work by a contemporary artist from China in more than one venue. After the exhibition of (CHECK NAME!!) at Spazju Kreattiv, the same works by He Ping were also exhibited at the The Mill - Arts, Culture and Crafts Centre in Birkirkara as part of the 3rd edition of the VIVA festival, in collaboration with the Gabriel Caruana Foundation.

The following year, Fondazzjoni Kreattività built on the long-standing working relationship it has developed with the China Cultural Centre (CCC) in Malta and invited Yang Zhiling to present a major exhibition of his works in Malta during the 2018 edition of VIVA. Through long conversation with Beijing-based curator Liang Shuhan, we explored the different understanding of what we mean by modern and contemporary art in both the European context as well as in China. Together we worked for several months to ensure that the work of Yang Zhiling was exhibited in Malta within our building with meaningful engagement with Spazju Kreattiv’s strategic vision, which revolves around the broad concepts of identity, diversity, and legacy. Yang’s work entered Fondazzjoni Kreattività’s Art Collection after this. To date, his To Carry Along Your Own Sunshine (2018) is by far the largest work in the entire collection. When in our 2019 we invited Ding Li to continue where he had left off with where Yang Zhiling, even though their work is not directly related, it is fairly evident to any keen observer of contemporary art from China that they are feeding from similar contexts. This is so, even if they are distinctly individual artists. Their inclusion of works that move away from the painterly convention in juxtaposition with the paintings bring the pictorial work to life in the opposite directions by offering a three-dimensional object as a work of art to behold in the same space as the flat art objects on the walls. Simultaneously, these elements provide a greater insight into the work of this artist working in contemporary China, where tradition and convention are in a constant dialectic with the contemporary realities we all experience in the world’s globalized culture.

A focus on the art being produced now in China is an essential exercise for any art institution around the work that wants to capture aspects of the spirit of the age. For what simplisitically can be called historical reasons, in previous centuries the centre of art production from a Maltese perspective has shifted from Italy to Britain, and eventually to other parts of Europe and the United States, the same can be said for China at this point in time. Thus it is encouraging to see that the Fondazzjoni Kreattività Art Collection already contains a good number of works, for its size, that can help in developing further engagement with some of the ideas presented here in terms of China’s place in the world now.