PROJECTS
Since 2014, I have worked in collectives and independently on collaborative and solo projects led by my practice in literature, intersecting with subjects of visual cultures, politics and identity.
FRANK U JIEN
Frank u Jien was an interdisciplinary experience that welcomed intimate audiences into the old art studio of Maltese modern artist and designer Frank Portelli (1922–2004). Curated by Andrew Borg Wirth, it brought together some of Malta’s most exciting contemporary performing and visual artists to showcase fragments of Portelli’s rich personal archive.
My playscript for Frank u Jien explored Portelli’s biography and the defining works from the artist’s oeuvre, alongside other key moments in Maltese art history.
DECADENCE, NOW.
My work ‘For Its Sake’ was commissioned by City of Art for its pilot project Decadence, Now. The project explored the lasting influence of the decadent movement upon twentieth-century culture and its continuous fuelling of a whole new wave of contemporary visual culture—a zeitgeist that has been carried on well into the twenty-first century, as it continues to discuss the future of the end of world.
‘For Its Sake’, which formed part of the project’s exhibition at the Malta Society of Arts in Valletta, reacted to one of the presented artefacts from the decadent movement, namely the Catalan artistic and literary journal Pèl & Ploma, the publication of which spanned the years 1899–1903. ‘For Its Sake’ presented an abundance of hair and a series of feathers.
POETRY
TRANSFORMATIONS & TRANSLATIONS
Transformations & Translations was a multi-disciplinary fashion project led by Luke Azzopardi Studio that drew inspiration from the mythological figure of Artemis, known to the Romans as Diana, goddess of the hunt, as well as the overlap between primitive and early historical references and motifs in nineteenth-century architecture. To this end, Transformations & Translations presented a performance where the craft of couture met music, poetry and dance. Performed at Malta’s National Museum of Archaeology, the performance spoke about the lifetime of an artwork, and the ways in which history can be revisited and reassembled to create the newer narratives of our contemporary moment.
INĦOBBOK (I LOVE YOU)
As part of Spazju Kreattiv’s 2015/2016 programme, inħobbok (i love you) was an exhibition set up by an art collective composed of four creatives, namely Luke Azzopardi (Malta), Umberto Buttigieg (Malta), Demetra Kallitsi (Cyprus) and myself.
inħobbok (i love you) was a project about words and love. It explored the sensory aspects of words that expressed the personal, erotic, familial and spiritual dimensions of love. By taking into account the exposition and exhibitionism of the self in relation to love, desire, narcissism and anonymity that had been at the forefront of recent global art practices and social media experiences, inħobbok (i love you) displayed various confessional modes of artistic practice that included: original writing, in diary and epistolary forms; the cataloguing of objects, emotions and memories; and the exploration of the interconnection between the ready-made, the over-used, originality and feeling.
My two artworks for inħobbok (i love you) were titled ‘baby, are you happy now?’ and ‘il-geometrija t’idejk’, both of which mourned love lost.
