Two UM academics, Professor Vince Briffa and Dr Trevor Borg from the Department of Digital Arts within the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, shall be representing Malta at the prestigious 58th Venice Art Biennale which opens on the 11 May 2019. The two artist academics are collaborating with the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering and with Heritage Malta. The theme of the Malta Pavilion, curated by Dr Hesperia Iliadou de Subplajo, is Maleth/Haven/Port - Heterotopias of Evocation. Professor Briffa, Dr Borg and Dr Klitsa Antoniou, an artist academic from Cyprus University of Technology will represent Malta with three separate art works in conversation with each other.
Outland, a multimedia installation by Professor Vince Briffa, focuses on the indecisiveness of man as he longs to re-trace his way to the ultimate Haven, caught between the safety of an island and the peril of returning to his homeland. Inspired by the Odyssey, it traces the symbolic duality of the lover, as saviour/oppressor, exploring the uncertainty and lure of safety, and the longing for freedom. Through its multiple narratives and sound, the installation explores man's complex relationship with his various realities, and the anxieties of such uncertainties.
Cave of Darkness– Port of No Return, a mixed-media installation by Dr Trevor Borg proposes a re imagined multilayered narrative of ancient creatures and long lost civilizations, exploring entrapment concealed within a Haven. Drawing from animal remains and artefacts excavated in a cave in Malta, the work seeks to make (up) histories and to fabricate realities and semblances.
ATLANTROPA-X, a multimedia installation by Dr Klitsa Antoniou, explores a 1920s project by German architect H. Sörgel that proposed the partial draining of the Mediterranean to form a super continent. The artworks will hover between past and contemporary conditions, of surviving displacement and discontinuity amid conflict, migrations within the current context of fluid topographies and challenged expectations.
Follow the artists' progress on this project on their facebook page.