Consuming one’s self

Nikki Petroni A sequence of separate, incidental happenings can lead to corresponding situations wherein one gives live to the other, or even accentuates qualities previously concealed. Victor Agius’ current exhibition CONSUME, curated by Irene Biolchini, deals precisely with the indivisibility of occurrences; personal and collective, organic and inorganic.

Spread across the four spaces of the Upper Galleries at Spazju Kreattiv, Agius leads the viewers across a series of interconnected artistic events and their unplanned byproducts. The story begins with the artist working on a sculptural piece that was to be temporarily installed at Pjazza Teatru Rjal in 2015. In the process of its making, the piece accidentally caught fire, and Agius had to be taken to hospital for oxygen. This microtragedy was interpreted by the artist as a form of coincidental historical repetition wherein the Opera House’s fate seeped into his productive life in an uncanny fashion. Kapitell was the artwork that emerged from this cross-temporal juxtaposition between a fallen building and a contemporary artist.

The ruins of Barry’s Valletta theatre are iconic because they have become part of the capital’s genetic structure. They stood still for years whilst the country discussed their future, and now they support Renzo Piano’s contemporary theatre. The architect’s decision not to rebuild the theatre has preserved the essential part of the structure: its memory. Ruins are the materialisation of memory; distant, vague, incomplete, nostalgic, and inspiring.

Agius, whose works deal with collective memory and place, elaborated upon the relationship between memory and destruction, but also upon the recognised function of a present or past object. In the second room was displayed a perimeter of 170-year-old discarded decorative stonework that once adorned a church in Gozo. Facing the floor installation was a series of black ceramic sculptures that were based on the organic forms of the decorative stones. Their colour suggested their destruction and, like the discarded decorations, were put into disuse. They no longer served a divine purpose. As explained in the exhibition text, the material became matter again. The status of art is thus vulnerable as its meaning changes according to its presentation and environment. Following Arthur Danto’s line of thought, Agius gave new life to all the discarded objects included in the show by placing them in a space where one expects to encounter art.

Space three was an existential dialogue between stones. A video of rock being quarried in Qala played on a screen, filling the room with industrial sounds, and was placed in front of five found ornamental stone pieces overcome by natural decay. This particular section told a story within a story narrating the beginning and the end of the life of such stone objects. The narrative was more about human intervention into their lives rather than on the organic unfold- ing of a stone’s lifetime. Its crucial statement was on the artificial dependency of human consumption. In this section was included a photograph by Nero/Alessandro Neretti, an Italian artist who is collaborating with Agius during his residency period in Għarb, Gozo.

The final room, titled ‘Consumption’, presented a series of repeated images and massproduced ceramic souvenirs of Kapitell together with burned pieces of furniture. The scene was a decadent one; shiny, new and repeated mass produced objects coexisting with those that had lost their purpose yet maintained their individuality. What was posited in the first room as a symbolic object, a coincidental emblem of past and present experience, was in the last rendered vapid. The consumable image was the only lasting memory of the ephemeral installation. Cleverly, the souvenir pieces crafted in ceramics and burnt sheep’s wool were named Kollox Sar Suf; everything has evaporated into nothingness. Here, Agius made a self-reflective remark on his own artistic practice; the artwork’s journey from mystification to the market.

Upon visiting the exhibition with Agius and Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, I was immediately taken by the entire project and the many important themes explored by the artist in the divided spaces. Agius and I had previously discussed the project and I had seen some fragments, so the material was not entirely unfamiliar. It was obvious that since our last meeting Agius had pondered on the life of the objects artists create, find, reuse, and appropriate together with the systems that manufacture their significance. There was a new dimension that was never so pronounced in previous works of his, and that was the consideration of artificial processes and how these have become part of our life-death continuum.

Schembri Bonaci aroused a pertinent issue during our joint visit that wasn’t strongly apparent to me as someone who already had a general idea of the exhibition prior to seeing it. The visual components, albeit their individual visual appeal, did not narrate the story that Agius yearned to tell without the assistance of the explanatory texts found in each room. Such is a trope of contemporary art. Artists do not need to address common representations unlike traditional artists who could rely on the knowledge of their audience. Today, artists almost always have to supplement the art object with a written description. However, Agius purposely chose to develop an exhibition across four chapters as a coherent narrative piece, and at times that much-needed visual link between objects and chapters was more of a quiver than a resolute statement. The ability to convey narratives through visual components is a lost skill that some are struggling to retrieve.

The chosen space was a contributing factor to this shortcoming. Spazju Kreattiv’s galleries are open and bare, ever-ready to be filled with art but also quite imposing because of their aura of non-commitment. Memory, meaning, and the sensory tend to be lost in such exhibition spaces. This is a paradox since they offer unrestrained opportunity precisely because of their bareness. More objects and images were needed to combat the bareness of the rooms, especially since the artist wanted to convey his message by means of materiality rather than form. Agius usually produces on-site installations that fully engage with the history and memory of places which are themselves loaded with the marks of time. It seems that his organic way of working also requires those spaces that incite his creative impetus for their public presentation.

CONSUME forms part of the Spazju Kreattiv and VIVA 2017 programmes. The exhibition is open every day until 11 June. On Thursday 8th June a live sound performance by Renzo Spiteri will take place at the galleries at 20:00. A catalogue of the exhibition was published with texts by Prof. Vince Briffa and Dr. Irene Biolchini, accompanied with photography by Daniel Cilia and Elisa von Brockdorff.