The Ggantija Art Project started as a long-term collaboration in 2013 between the visual artist Victor Agius and composer Mariella Cassar Cordina, together with writer Immanuel Mifsud. Victor and Mariella have formed an NGO under the name of Ars Vitae Ensemble to create collaborative projects that use contemporary art and music composition as a primary medium.
The exhibition at St James Cavalier is Victor Agius’ final work for the second phase of the Ggantija 2013 Art Project; a body of work which stems from the first intervention of the artist within the Ggantija Temples site last year. This time, Victor is shifting context, while remaining loyal to his beloved temple’s roots. Working in a sculptural idiom, he recasts rural patches of the dark earth into large and sometimes massive sculptures, where like the farmer who works the land in order to bear fruit, he works the land so that the land itself becomes its own Arcadia, an unspoiled, harmonious sculptural wilderness that many times belies the same intervention of the artist, as he purposely leaves no trace of his hand, making his intervention one with nature.
The works we are seeing in this exhibition are the result of a deep-rooted labour of love for place and an obsessive, shamanic act of appropriation and possession. Indeed, Victor is preoccupied by the practice of appropriating natural forms, found and even utilitarian objects and displacing them from their day-to-dayness, giving them a new meaning through shifting their context. This act is one of honest transposition of forms through a rudimentary sculptural method, where the artist prefers to give the work an air of sincerity and where he lifts the natural form into the sculptural sublime. Raw clay, found pebbles, spiky shards, loose twigs and natural pigments are the vocabulary of Victor’s language; producing a sincere statement which draws on our ecological experience and translates itself into an archaeology of form and matter, reflecting on the reality of our lived experience of the natural world.
Victor aims to interpret form through re-inventing the function of what is perceived to be familiar. The materials he uses are displaced from their commonplace and turned into an art object through this honest act of sculptural translation. The narrative these objects emit is rooted in a duality of familiarity and ambiguity. The artist is well aware of this and constantly pushes us to consider the new meaning behind such commonplace forms. The work therefore, seems to speak of vagueness, where the material it is made of is not clay or does not come from land any more. We also find it difficult at times to conceive if the forms are in their positive or negative states. Is this a found object of little value or is it a prized artefact that has been lovingly cast in order to save it for posterity? Is what we are experiencing a collection of contemporary art work or is this amalgamation of matter, that creates a discordant resonance with the whiteness of the gallery walls, more at home in a museum of natural history? Such questions are the impetus that drive the artist forward into his quest at re-inventing the anima of the land. Like the shamanic creators of Ggantija, he believes that through preserving the outer form, he is encapsulating the spirit.
The ambiguity of this evocation is further heightened by the visceral sonority of Cassar Cordina’s composition in the documentation gallery, which manages to concurrently evoke the primordial desires of our ancestors while contemporaneously speak in a modish language. Like Agius’ work, this evocative composition cuts across the boundaries of the temples on a spatial level, claiming site specificity through the expansive setup of its performers; and also on a temporal level through its coeval and inclusive locution which spans millennia.
This exhibition invites the visitor to immerse herself in the primordial life force of this exhibition, in order to share in the artist’s recreating of the soul of the prehistoric temple, and to the uplifting of nature’s elements to the venerable altar of the gallery.
The final exhibition of Ggantija 2013 Project is open at the upper galleries of St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in Valletta. Today is the last chance to view this exhibition until 1pm.
Ggantija 2013 Project is hosted by St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity and Heritage Malta and is supported by the Malta Arts Fund, Banif Bank (Malta) plc, Gasan Mamo Insurance, Gozo Cultural Office, Xaghra Local Council, Gozo Express Services Ltd, Artsphere International, Marsamena Wines and The Janatha Stubbs Foundation.