Introductory text on some of the works by Norbert Francis Attard
MARIO AZZOPARDI
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Palestrina and Hell
Johanneskirche, Feldkirch, Austria, 2003.
Electronic music by Ian Boddy.
Palestrina and Hell, curated by Eva Jacob.
PVC membrane, water, scaffolding, light, 8 sub-woofers,
4 speakers, 2 CD players, 2 amplifiers, 2 skeletons.
Water is the catalyctic element motivating the installation: it is the purifying, baptismal agent that ‘’segregates’’ and at the same time, ‘’fuses’’ the extreme poles of the upper and lower ‘’chambers’’ of existence. There is a split between what is beatic and peaceful and what is sinister and foreboding. Water is introduced as a mirror to extreme realities but also as a refractory conductor that splits space and truth. Is this a moment of extreme existential anxiety or a moment of spiritual reconciliation? Is this an uncompromising visitation to a season in hell or a deliverance through water? And are we objective viewers or are we intertwined in this manifestation of dual extremes? The very act of watching and listening seems to make us all accomplices…
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The Zealot
Old prisons, The Citadel, Victoria, Gozo, 2003.
Escape, curated by Austin Camilleri.
Back-lit digital photograph 240 cm x 240 cm on Perspex, light, wood.
8th Havana Biennale, Havana, Cuba, 2003.
Curated by Hilda Maria Rodriguez.
Digital photograph 400 cm x 600 cm printed on canvas.
This is the vulgar triumph of a zealot who anticipates that the theatrical staging of his "crucifixion" will secure massive political attention over time. It is the navel, not the nails, that attracts the most attention. The navel is a most crucial detail, since the "navel" of Christ's Church , i.e. Byzantium and then Rome, became such a central powermongering locus, that the instruments of sacrifice (the nails) became irrelevant stage-props. What we have here is the mocking impact of religious politics, an insulting bigotry, operating in the name of liberation.
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A Place called Paradise I & II
78, Old Mint Street, Valletta, Malta, 2002.
Cityspaces, organized by Y.M.C.A, curated by Rafael Vella.
Sand, text, umbrella, deck chair, sink, bucket, motorized pump, coloured water.
This scene is set up in a room in a worn-out part of the city, Valletta. The building contains a shaft leading to a small internal yard, where the artist has hung one hundred bright-red body-towels. Beneath the sand, Attard reproduces selections from The Art of Travel, by de Botton, which tells about two people on a trip to Barbados, arguing about trite matters and loading their journey with boredom and frustration. It offers a perfect setting for a drama in the absurd idiom. The striking theatrical quality reminds one of a set fit for a sequence from Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett or Le Teatre de La Carriera. We are in front of a scene that suspends reality: it is a conscious set up that paints everything in red (the colour of passion and energy) but which vacates the room of any human content. Nobody sits on the armchair and beneath the umbrella; we do not know who hung the intimate pieces of female clothes on the balcony and we have no idea why there is such a profusion of towels hanging in the shaft. Moreover, a red liquid pours from the tap and into a bucket. This is the theatre of charades. The room almost suggests the scene of a crime and spectators are invited to move in, disturb the sand on the floor and investigate the narrative. Or construct their own.
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Back to Babel
St.James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity, Valletta, Malta, 1999.
Art in Malta Today, curated by Joseph Paul Cassar.
2 video projectors, 2 video players, one book, newspapers, light.
Drawing on classical, biblical elements, the Babel installation focuses on linguistic fragmentation as a social phenomenon. It also makes a forceful statement of dissent against subliminal advertising, where people’s minds are assaulted by aural and visual impressions, without being actually aware of the massive implications. The matter grows into unconscious conditioning, even indoctrination, against which art, as a free agent, can perhaps still raise a voice on behalf of the alienated crowds. The question is whether the artist’s voice can influence and modify the complex code of language symbols that enslave us in a digital age.
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House of Cards
Debenhams Windows, Manchester, England.
Blueprint Faker & Citadel Makers (A-Z of Virtual Municipality), curated by Mike Dawson.
20 digitally printed photographs, foamboard
In our global times city planning and urban dwelling have instigated artists to rethink not only about their own space within the city, but whether their production is providing enough room for contemplation on such complex matters as the jungled expansion of urban locations. The disassembled “chambers” of the vulnerable “House of Cards” are re-thought and re-grouped with an autonomy of their own, as if to provide contemplative refuge. The dilapidated state of the images seems to be attracting the artist, as if creativity is still possible under such conditions. The open structure of Attard’s chamber-assembly seems to be allowing the possibility of rethinking an open verdict: when new buildings replace the old, and when new urban zones rise on the abandoned sites of unprosperous, unrepaired dwellings, is an artist losing a part of his soul? Is his silence silence condoning the indiscriminate transformation and the loss? Is part of the artist’s sensibility being eradicated along with the old buildings?
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Earth Temple
Tollwood Festival,Olympia Park, Munich, Germany, 1998.
Transcutan, curated by Ludwig Frank.
Timber round poles, earth, pebbles.
Working for an environmental project, (Transkutan) Attard reminds spectators that he comes from an island famed for its unique prehistoric temple structures. But in the artist’s “temple” representation two crucial modifications occur: i. the interior of the earth Temple now forms a cross, unlike the womb-like interiors of the original temples of Malta; ii. the massive monoliths of the original holy places are transformed into rubble stone. Moving within the temple confines of Attard’s creation, “spect-actors” endorse the change of concept: the womb yields to the ritual cross of sacrifice (but also of redemption), while the shreds of stone summon memories of mystique and mystery.
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Path to Transcendence
Macedonia Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2003.
The Paths to Europe, curated by Dimitri Konstantinidis and Monika Sielska.
Organised by APPOLONIA, Strasbourg, France, and ARTBOX, Thessaloniki, Greece.
12.5 metre long trailer, upholstered table and chairs, mirror, blue carpet, light.
This is a triple metaphorical representation of Malta’s path to Europe. The key elements here are water, a mirror and a table-cum-chairs. The image of the sea has always held for Malta a dualism: it used to be regarded as boundary symbol, signifying a protective isolation (against invasion) but then, after Independence (in 1964) the sea became a metaphor for liberation, for reaching out, freely this time, towards the continent and elsewhere. On the other hand, the mirror reflects reality, but this time it is showing an “evolved” reality, a virtual mutation, one that even turns and extends the sea into a promise for transcendence. The table and chairs represent dialogue, the elements whereupon the political transactions take place, without ever forgetting the island’s nature, its visions and projections.
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Breath of Mind
Taechon Lake, Chonju, South Korea, 1998.
Breath, curated by Park Bjung Wook.
International Art and Environmental Symposium.
Organized by Nine Dragon Heads, South Korea.
Korean rope and wood.
The wooden cage, made of wood and Korean rope, stands on a shifting lake as an image of foreboding power: when the water rises it becomes a prison, reminding viewers of the water-punishment used during the Vietnam War, when prisoners were lowered beneath the murky, bloody waters. According to terms of Attard’s construction, when the lake water subsides, the confines of the cage are contradicted, as reflections reach out of the cage and unto the water, creating extensions into freedom. However, it is a temporary, relative freedom, a vulnerable “frame of time” that could be violated at any moment. The thrust of the installation is eco-political. It an urgent call provoked by a mental climate in a geo-social context.
Twelve Dialogues
Francis Caruana Timber Stores, Xewkija, Gozo, Malta, 2003
Twelve Dialogues, curated by Norbert Francis Attard.
28 Swedish pine identical chairs.
Norbert Attard makes use of a basic technique that belongs to the theatre. A series of “chairs” becomes the site of multiple possibilities for dialogue, whereby performers are trained to enter a mental process to induce (and fuse) imaginative discourse. The chairs themselves create “opposition” and there could be no theatre without such a position of contrast. But the installation also uses symbolist design by way of selecting very simple wooden structures that could stand as alternatives for human dynamics. Like the symbolist imagists of the stage, Attard uses his “chairs” as if they were “things-in-themselves”, containing an internal reality. Within such a context spect-actors are invited to witness an exercise in dramatic shorthand. Attard provides only the titles of the scenes, but leaves the constructions to work on the imagination of the actors or viewers. Away from the concept of the stage as a pulpit, the artist impacts the scene by setting sharp symbolic images that have a life of their own. Inviting his viewers to an interactive interpretation of the theatrical arrangement, what the chair-images are “saying” could be anyone’s valid guess. But one thing is clear: these constructs are far from silent.
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Glasshouse Mountains
Woodford Festival, Woodford, Queensland, Australia, 2001.
Sticks and Stones, curated by Peggy Smith.
Bamboo, lava stones, rope and branches.
The universal symbol of the circle is a crucial factor in the ancient civilization of the Mediterranean, the artist’s formative cradle. Elemental materials, including stones and branches, compose Attard’s circular, energizing installation. The shape is also remarkably reminiscent of a firework structure (so typical of Malta’s celebratory rituals) , a wheel that is ready to erupt into powerful action at any given instance. Assembled for a Festival of Art Forms in Australia, the circular sculpture can be seen to convey totality and wholeness as products of self-knowledge and self-projection, so closely related to the creative act.
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Grey is Hard to Find
Portomaso, Malta, 2002.
Uber, Group show of fourteen artists, curated by Mark Mangion.
Glass coffin, grey fabric, dried dung, laptop showing video.
The scene is set for burial. Drapes suspend the solitary coffin and the earth is ready to cover the imminent and complete disintegration of the corpse. But the convention of the burial is disturbed. The coffin is made of glass and the digital screen continues to project images of life and human activity, including written documentation. The installation becomes a denial of death, a desperate appeal for survival. The glass, seemingly protective, serves only to project illusion and to reflect the spectators’ own sentence to death. On the other hand the screened fleeting images are nothing more than just that. The ultimate truth has to do with the extreme divide between life and death. It is white pigmentation against black. Grey is not reliable in the least.
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Split
GOZO contemporary, Gozo, Gharb, Malta, 2003
Norbert Francis Attard in collaboration with Sumer Erek.
Hollow section metal channels, metal wire, string
A cage of nerve fibres closes on a woman. A system of cell and fibre excitations arrest the female body, which seems to offer no resistance. The woman remains passive, directing her attention neither to stimulus nor to response. There is no female hysteria here, no psychogenic reaction rising from provocation, anxiety, conflict or repression. In fact, the woman is clinically objectivised, unsexed and mutely defiant. The cage is a male construction, an extension of male paranoia in response to the female power of indifference. The total lack of sensorial reaction on the part of the woman intensifies the unemotional threat, making the cage redundant, even inane.
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Beyond Conflict
The Oratory, 2nd Liverpool Biennial (Independent), England, 2002.
Beyond Conflict, curated by Mike Hurst.
Organised by the afoundation, Liverpool, England.
Red and green fabric.
Using an old burial place, Liverpool’s Oratory, Norbert Attard encloses the classic building with massive bands of fabric, weaving red and green as opposites. One meaning for this unorthodoxly conceived dressing is that in death, all opposites are neutralised and contradictions do not hold any longer. Besides the choice of red and green as opposites, the installation conveys another sense of duality: the inner and the outer. The inner element (death) is sealed away and the outer reality celebrates, momentarily, passionate energy (red) and hopeful tranquility (green). Attard’s installation utilizes form and colour in a configuration that confronts the observer with an appearance of materiality, when in fact, the ultimate significance of the inner meaning has to do, yet again, with a metaphysical concept, related to death and beyond.
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Cycle
8th Havana Biennale, Havana, Cuba, 2003.
Curated by Hilda Maria Rodriguez.
Digital photograph 400 cm x 600 cm, PVC membrane, water, artificial legs.
From the mists of antiquity (far older than Christ or any other god-like being) the image of the suffering body comes back, recurrently, to remind us of liberation through pain. Through water, another ancient sign related to birth, purification and rebirth, pain (and therefore sin) is dissolved. And the spirit is made clean.The inversely crucified female image, blindfolded to suggest that it does not belong to any particular time-frame. Moreover, the suffering female intensifies the cyclical motiv, even in biological terms. As the image touches the water, it is purified and assumes a lyrical, mystic quality. The woman has freed herself and us through her pain cycle and the liberation is celebrated by water. But out of the cathartic pool, a pair of legs, blood-stained, ominous and unexpected, emerge to haunt us, disturbing the baptismal setting. Sin is reborn, recycled.
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Rites of Passage
Auberge de Castille, Valletta, Malta, 1999.
Rites of Passage, curated by Peter Serracino Inglott.
December 31st 1999 Millenium celebrations and official opening of
St.James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity, Valletta, Malta.
Back-projected video onto the entrance door of the Prime Ministers office.
The celebrations marking Malta’s passage into the new millennium continues. The quality of the images is both historical and mythical, lending a distinct interpretation to Malta’s key-moments of evolvement, from pagan fertility worship to the intense Christocentric texture of contemporary devotion. The installation serves as a manifestation of collective faith, not in the traditional sense that suggests mere acceptance of certain prepositions, but as an analysis of the islanders’ mystical attachment to higher forces. It is also significant that the images for this installation were projected onto the entrance of the building representing Malta’s seat of political power: the soliciting for the Island’s future visions became emphatic and socially-charged.
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Ora Pro Nobis
Cathedral Museum, Mdina, Malta, 2000.
2nd Biennale of ContemporaryChristian Art.
Ora Pro Nobis, curated by Mgr. Vincent. Borg.
Two thousand shoes, Video projector, monitor,two video players.
In this disturbing installation, shoes strewn inside an oppressive enclosure (seemingly with a dead end) yield different meanings. They could be the shoes that a mass of people have left behind as they escaped from haunting experiences, possibly of their own doing. The shoes could also belong to people who have been swallowed up by a contemporary plague, a sweeping disaster, a holocaust. The large collection of abandoned shoes has a narrative of its own. The silent presence of the shoes is manifestly deceptive: every pair of shoes, far being “silent”, are having a harrowing story to divulge. The supplication of prayer over the uncanny remnants in the tunnel seems to invoke pity, rather than hope, infusing the scene with relentless despair. Our own despair, too, as the title suggests. We are implicated in the title, which uses the litanic form to incriminate “us” (nobis).
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Tolerance of Ambiguity
Ciudad de Oviedo, Spain, 1998.
Diaspora International Contemporary Art Meeting curated by Javier Baron,
Orlando Britto Jinorio, Luciano Escanilla, Anke Mellin, Andres Pereiro, Cuco Suarez.
Rendered cement on red bricks, metal pin, plank of wood.
The structure signifying Tolerance of Ambiguity evokes the brunt of illogical politics. Why would “balance” be sought by means of a see-saw that is actually blocked by a wall, screening “the other side”? Why would one choose to “see-saw” rather than take the logical route, climb the stairs and meet “the other” on the plateau of convergence? Norbert Attard’s installation, erected as a metaphor for the theme of exile and hopeful fusion, addresses the obsession with political circumnavigation as the absurdity that defies reason. Does the interactive nature of the piece threaten to turn participants into obliging partners to the state of play?
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Larger than Life I & II
St. James Cavalier, Valletta, Malta, 1999.
Re-Interpreting Preti, curated by Dominic Cutajar, Adrian Bartolo and Theresa Vella.
9 slide projectors, 6m motorized pendulum, monitor, video player, 24 torchlights, candles.
48th Venice Biennale, Italy, 1999.
Larger than Life, curated by Adrian Bartolo.
4m motorized pendulum, video projector, monitor, two video players.
Against the austere, arched walls of St. James Cavalier, a sixteenth century military stronghold, the artist projected images from Mattia Preti, an exuberant Baroque painter who spent the last forty years of his life in Malta. Attard’s Baroque celebration reflects Malta’s aesthetic preference for an elaborate style that connects space and time. Cutting across time frames, the Baroque has left an indelible mark on Malta’s society and its imagination. The time-passage motif is accentuated by Attard’s creation of ‘routes’, transforming the severe vaults of the fortress building into ornate expressions responding to Baroque theatricality. At the end of the pathway, the artist installs a pendulum, a metaphor of abstract time that also “contradicts” spatial distance: the Baroque perception in Malta has no time-frames and it survives in the 21st century in religious ceremonial, village feasts, heavily decorated dwellings and band music. Moreover, on the pendulum-pan, Attard screens sequences from a Maltese wedding, an elaborate, flamboyant expression of popular culture that provides a contemporary link to the high Baroque fashion that dominated Malta and its islanders since the seventeenth century.
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One Extreme to Another
St.Leonards School, St. Andrews, Scotland, 2002.
One Extreme to Another, curated by Donna Rae.
100m. white fabric, red spray, table, chair, computer keyboard.
Working with art students the artist returns to a concept related to red, the primary colour of life, emotion, passion and energy, but also of political agitation. In a publication entitled I See Red Everywhere (2002) Norbert Attard quoted from Wittgenstein: “Can I say drink in the colour red and then you’ll see that it can never be presented by anything else?” The artist now seems to be wanting to impress upon the minds of a group of adolescent students that red is the medium: 120 meters of crimplene fabric were covered with graffiti sprayed in red, claiming sunshine, love, passion, sex, pain, war, violence and death in the form of execution. To emphasise the textual message further, Attard planted in his installation a red computer keyboard, a red table and a red chair. The provocative (even disturbing) feature of the installation had to do with its being devised in a serene garden, with the fabric used to link two sturdy trees, symbols of stability. Attard challenges the passive reality of the garden (a paradise of illusion) and attempts to answer Wittgenstein’s fundamental question, in alliance with a group of young people prepared to venture into the intellectual research for red symbolism and for authentic life meanings. Even if that denotes the extremes on the margins.
Salina’s Lament
Pinto Stores, Pinto Wharf, Valletta, Malta, 2003.
Borders, curated by START and Richard Davies.
Music by electronic sound artist Ian Boddy.
Poem by Mario Azzopardi.
Re-assembled structure found on premises, PVC membrane,
water, CD player, amplifier, four speakers, light.
Poets are summoned to look upon the misery of Salina, a woman representing the victims of global injustice and violent death. She looks inside the fatal wound that killed the man she loved and the poets, as guardians or prophets of justice, are solicited to speak in her name. They are asked to fill Salina's miserable 'wound of pain' with poetry, as a sign that her pitiful bereavement is, indeed a symbol for all those who thirst for justice, and whose memories are also filled with pain. The presence (or absence) of water in the poem remains ambivalent, ambiguous: Is this the water that drowns all hope? Is it the water that retains drowned memories of pity? Is it the water of purgation or the water of regeneration?
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House of Cards
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Debenhams Windows, Manchester, England.
Blueprint Faker & Citadel Makers (A-Z of Virtual Municipality), curated by Mike Dawson.
20 digitally printed photographs, foamboard
In our global times city planning and urban dwelling have instigated artists to rethink not only about their own space within the city, but whether their production is providing enough room for contemplation on such complex matters as the jungled expansion of urban locations. What Norbert Attard does here is to deconstruct existing realities to re-arrange them in a self-reflexive mood. The disassembled “chambers” of the vulnerable “House of Cards” are re-thought and re-grouped with an autonomy of their own, as if to provide contemplative refuge. The dilapidated state of the images seems to be attracting the artist, as if creativity is still possible under such conditions. The open structure of Attard’s chamber-assembly seems to be allowing the possibility of rethinking an open verdict: when new buildings replace the old, and when new urban zones rise on the abandoned sites of unprosperous, unrepaired dwellings, is an artist losing a part of his soul? Is his silence silence condoning the indiscriminate transformation and the loss? Is part of the artist’s sensibility being eradicated along with the old buildings?
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And Smuff2603
Pinto Stores, Pinto Wharf, Valletta, Malta, 2003.
Collaboration between Norbert Francis Attard and Mark Mangion.
Borders, curated by START and Richard Davies.
Three video projectors, three DVD players, specially constructed viewing room.
Unrelated images are projected whilst dialectical opposites inform the spectacle, as Attard continues his search to syntethise truth out of opposing forces. He creates a series of blends and clashes, a vast tissue of contradictory elements having to do with initiation and termination, agitation and repose, past and present, inclusion and exclusion and so forth. The perceptibility of frontal opposites is a textuality that resurfaces over and over again in Attard’s art. It is a form of philosophical interrogation that attaches skepticism to the pluriformity that informs Attard’s creations. Any conception that hits the mind of the artist is immediately confronted by a sense of “otherness”, a replacement that turns the original idea into something provisional, of temporary scale, liable to being dismissed as its opposite takes the foreground. The alternative search is everywhere and it bears the symptoms of our epoch.
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Balance
Wejba Creek, Noosa, Queensland, Australia. 2001.
The Floating Lan, curated by Kevin Wilson.
Organised by Noosa Regional Gallery, Noosa, Queensland, Australia.
Mirrored perspex, timber structure, branches.
Balance can mean an instrument for weighing. It can also refer to the imaginary scales of destiny, by which deeds and principles are weighed. It can mean the power to decide fate, to equipoise or to equalize.The boat in Attard’s version counteracts influence: it is of the sea, reflecting water and therefore, life, but its load is a spent, dry one. It is a dead load of spent energy and entropy, the product of a civilization that denies life and nature, cynically. The “balance” of the title thus confronts us with the concept of judgement: Your deeds have been weighed and you have been found wanting. On the scheme of time there only remains the journey of dead values.
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