At the end of December 2019, the first reports of a new Coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in China. Covid-19, as it would come to be known popularly, was a contagious disease caused by a severe acute respiratory syndrome, transmitted by people breathing in and out their conventional air and contaminating it with diseased droplets and airborne particles. People began dying in swathes, and by the end of March 2020 Italy had become Europe’s first casualty to the virus’ unrelenting societal overhaul. Country after country would follow, with governments battening down on all non-essential activity, industry, and human mobility. The word ‘lockdown’ entered the everyday lexicon of the global community. Covid-19 became the world’s universal language – a condition that exposed the truths around what it meant to live at the extremities of isolation and togetherness. These truths are captured in arresting severity in Attard’s Lockdown 2020, where the artist once again elicits the metaphoric depth of the found object, or objet trouvé, which is a practice that Attard frequently uses where he adopts an everyday artefact and displays it with “minimal alteration”. (Chivers, Glaves-Smith, 2009) In this instance his conscription is a vintage padlock, inscribed with the phrase ‘Lockdown 2020’. In his dramatic suspension of the lock from a large metal frame with chains suspended from the trusses above, Attard creates a moment of tension, drawing focus to what he has positioned as the iconography of isolation. Here, the central object holds the shared memories and sensations of anyone and everyone who endured the conditions of the pandemic’s restrictions – the padlock swings in eternal pensile motion, signifying both the supremacy and precariousness of Covid-19’s new-age prison. The iconography of the pandemic’s imprisonment drawn out further in Attard’s Hitting the Wall, an installation that includes thirty suspended chains forming a semi-permeable threshold, creating a wall within the exhibition space that is able to be penetrated and passed through, but which projects signals of inaccessibility and captivity. In the same month that the pandemic materialised in China, hordes of demonstrators took to the streets of Valletta, vilifying the government’s proximity to the newly arrested murder suspect in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination. In a series of swelling protests, a unified call for justice had been dramatically sounded. Cries echoed in unison through the gridded streets of the capital, vindicating a woman who had come to be crowned by many as the nation’s ‘invicta’. (Staff reporter, 2019) Eventually, the demonstrations met with the resignation of the sitting prime minister, Joseph Muscat – a man who Caruana Galizia had tied inexorably with Malta’s gradual moral decline. His exit stood as a metaphorical fulcrum for the nation’s ethical direction – Malta was at a precipice, facing the opportunity for redemption. Covid-19 had other plans. (Micallef, Piscopo, Casha, Borg, Vella, Zammit, 2020) By summer 2020, Maltese conventional society had become unrecognisable for two reasons. The first, was that it had succumbed – like other societies around the world – to the virus’ mandate for social and physical distance. Activity was suspended beyond all but isolated, health-related endeavours. The islands were quiet and motionless, its people inside, away from the peril of infection. The second, was that the nation seemed for a moment to be united – its typical political and ideological schism neutralised by a shared concern for public wellbeing and widespread acquiescence of personal freedom to civic obedience. Yet as people at first worked together to battle the relentless force of the pandemic, the seeds of self-serving individualism were being sown deeper throughout the nation. Seemingly, they were manifesting to a different end – an obligatory end; an end that declared every man for himself because it needed to. By widespread directive, people were being instructed implicitly and explicitly to safeguard their individual bodies. Attard’s work, Sole, gives credence to this hierarchy of priorities. Its title and inverted triangular composition speak of the age-old adage that positions ‘every man for himself’. Its soap boars speak of the vigilance of sterility and the newfound fear of the unclean. Besides local inactivity, international travel was also suspended, and Malta once again was handicapped by its island remoteness. Airport screens with lines of updates around cancelled flights embodied this flashing visual of absurdity, eventually subverted by Attard with graphic delicacy in his works, Cancelled I and Cancelled II. By extension to this forced immobility, individual psyches were also sequestered, cordoned off into a state of hysterical hypochondria. The galvanised instinct for self-protection would eventually morph into a relative of historic self-interest, resembling a momentarily suspended predisposition for greed. After a while, the unified fight against the virus converted into a cesspit of individual inconveniences, a social straitjacket that had padlocked all aspects of daily life into a prison of numbing monotony. Malta’s death toll was recited robotically – as visualised with intentional levity by Attard’s Super CV, made from scores of glossy, plastic soap boxes existing in Attard’s repertoire of found objects, collected and utilised as a salient medium throughout a string of works in the series. The ordinariness of the material Attard chooses to employ in this and other works, mirrors the normality of Covid-19’s daily death rate, which, over time, converted into a regular indicator of how much longer and more impactfully citizens’ lives would have to be kept on hold. As people died, restauranteurs, party organisers and tourism authorities delivered speeches of gross injustice to their industry. (Coneely, 2020) An underground system of socialising grew rife – circumventing the rules of household gathering through the dexterity of Malta’s longstanding tradition of secret-keeping. Throughout it all, an ongoing obsession with sterilisation sank into the public consciousness. Devoid of any irony or introspection, the act of washing one’s hands clean of any unsanitary trace became a harmless narrative and dictated habit. This, together with an overtly self-focused urgency around preservation of individual health, became people’s default priority. Attard’s Body Builder sublimates this obsession into an abridged story of intimate, individual defeat over the reproductivity of the virus. Gradually, personal health took precedence over anything else on the civic agenda. Without the metaphorical conversations around the fire, without the potency of live conversation and exchange capable of escalating into rallying cries of dissent, the individualistic battle against the virus superseded the act of holding government to criminal accountability. Hand sanitisers replaced hand-held plaques of condemnation. Finding ways to survive the isolation of Covid-19 – whether through illicit meetings, solitary over-consumption, or the acting out of hyper-anxieties – trumped any form of political activism. In yet another state of hypernormalised consciousness, society had unwittingly abandoned one of its central defenders, unable to summon momentum for action even in moments of solitary arousal of conviction. Throughout it all, the theme of isolation took centre stage. Attard captures the clinical and unrelenting condition of seclusion in his work Alone – a backdrop of sickly blue miniature tiles playing host to a lone soap tray and its counterpart soap bar. Here, Attard puts forward a portrait of a period of time; signifying the inescapability of the pandemic’s isolating enforcement. During this period, quarantine of the body extended to quarantine of selfhood. Introspection and hyper-self-analysis usurped the conventional regularities of thought and experience. But Alone also eulogises the spirit of the singular warrior – the independent soldier whose aim is exclusively to cleanse the world of moral injustice. Alone is both us, stranded in isolation, and a journalist working independently. It is anyone who opposes and seeks to stamp out the world’s most deadly contaminants. At the end of December 2019, the first reports of a new Coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in China. Covid-19, as it would come to be known popularly, was a contagious disease caused by a severe acute respiratory syndrome, transmitted by people breathing in and out their conventional air and contaminating it with diseased droplets and airborne particles. People began dying in swathes, and by the end of March 2020 Italy had become Europe’s first casualty to the virus’ unrelenting societal overhaul. Country after country would follow, with governments battening down on all non-essential activity, industry, and human mobility. The word ‘lockdown’ entered the everyday lexicon of the global community. Covid-19 became the world’s universal language – a condition that exposed the truths around what it meant to live at the extremities of isolation and togetherness. These truths are captured in arresting severity in Attard’s Lockdown 2020, where the artist once again elicits the metaphoric depth of the found object, or objet trouvé, which is a practice that Attard frequently uses where he adopts an everyday artefact and displays it with “minimal alteration”. (Chivers, Glaves-Smith, 2009) In this instance his conscription is a vintage padlock, inscribed with the phrase ‘Lockdown 2020’. In his dramatic suspension of the lock from a large metal frame with chains suspended from the trusses above, Attard creates a moment of tension, drawing focus to what he has positioned as the iconography of isolation. Here, the central object holds the shared memories and sensations of anyone and everyone who endured the conditions of the pandemic’s restrictions – the padlock swings in eternal pensile motion, signifying both the supremacy and precariousness of Covid-19’s new-age prison. The iconography of the pandemic’s imprisonment drawn out further in Attard’s Hitting the Wall, an installation that includes thirty suspended chains forming a semi-permeable threshold, creating a wall within the exhibition space that is able to be penetrated and passed through, but which projects signals of inaccessibility and captivity. In the same month that the pandemic materialised in China, hordes of demonstrators took to the streets of Valletta, vilifying the government’s proximity to the newly arrested murder suspect in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination. In a series of swelling protests, a unified call for justice had been dramatically sounded. Cries echoed in unison through the gridded streets of the capital, vindicating a woman who had come to be crowned by many as the nation’s ‘invicta’. (Staff reporter, 2019) Eventually, the demonstrations met with the resignation of the sitting prime minister, Joseph Muscat – a man who Caruana Galizia had tied inexorably with Malta’s gradual moral decline. His exit stood as a metaphorical fulcrum for the nation’s ethical direction – Malta was at a precipice, facing the opportunity for redemption. Covid-19 had other plans. (Micallef, Piscopo, Casha, Borg, Vella, Zammit, 2020) By summer 2020, Maltese conventional society had become unrecognisable for two reasons. The first, was that it had succumbed – like other societies around the world – to the virus’ mandate for social and physical distance. Activity was suspended beyond all but isolated, health-related endeavours. The islands were quiet and motionless, its people inside, away from the peril of infection. The second, was that the nation seemed for a moment to be united – its typical political and ideological schism neutralised by a shared concern for public wellbeing and widespread acquiescence of personal freedom to civic obedience. Yet as people at first worked together to battle the relentless force of the pandemic, the seeds of self-serving individualism were being sown deeper throughout the nation. Seemingly, they were manifesting to a different end – an obligatory end; an end that declared every man for himself because it needed to. By widespread directive, people were being instructed implicitly and explicitly to safeguard their individual bodies. Attard’s work, Sole, gives credence to this hierarchy of priorities. Its title and inverted triangular composition speak of the age-old adage that positions ‘every man for himself’. Its soap boars speak of the vigilance of sterility and the newfound fear of the unclean. Besides local inactivity, international travel was also suspended, and Malta once again was handicapped by its island remoteness. Airport screens with lines of updates around cancelled flights embodied this flashing visual of absurdity, eventually subverted by Attard with graphic delicacy in his works, Cancelled I and Cancelled II. By extension to this forced immobility, individual psyches were also sequestered, cordoned off into a state of hysterical hypochondria. The galvanised instinct for self-protection would eventually morph into a relative of historic self-interest, resembling a momentarily suspended predisposition for greed. After a while, the unified fight against the virus converted into a cesspit of individual inconveniences, a social straitjacket that had padlocked all aspects of daily life into a prison of numbing monotony. Malta’s death toll was recited robotically – as visualised with intentional levity by Attard’s Super CV, made from scores of glossy, plastic soap boxes existing in Attard’s repertoire of found objects, collected and utilised as a salient medium throughout a string of works in the series. The ordinariness of the material Attard chooses to employ in this and other works, mirrors the normality of Covid-19’s daily death rate, which, over time, converted into a regular indicator of how much longer and more impactfully citizens’ lives would have to be kept on hold. As people died, restauranteurs, party organisers and tourism authorities delivered speeches of gross injustice to their industry. (Coneely, 2020) An underground system of socialising grew rife – circumventing the rules of household gathering through the dexterity of Malta’s longstanding tradition of secret-keeping. Throughout it all, an ongoing obsession with sterilisation sank into the public consciousness. Devoid of any irony or introspection, the act of washing one’s hands clean of any unsanitary trace became a harmless narrative and dictated habit. This, together with an overtly self-focused urgency around preservation of individual health, became people’s default priority. Attard’s Body Builder sublimates this obsession into an abridged story of intimate, individual defeat over the reproductivity of the virus. Gradually, personal health took precedence over anything else on the civic agenda. Without the metaphorical conversations around the fire, without the potency of live conversation and exchange capable of escalating into rallying cries of dissent, the individualistic battle against the virus superseded the act of holding government to criminal accountability. Hand sanitisers replaced hand-held plaques of condemnation. Finding ways to survive the isolation of Covid-19 – whether through illicit meetings, solitary over-consumption, or the acting out of hyper-anxieties – trumped any form of political activism. In yet another state of hypernormalised consciousness, society had unwittingly abandoned one of its central defenders, unable to summon momentum for action even in moments of solitary arousal of conviction. Throughout it all, the theme of isolation took centre stage. Attard captures the clinical and unrelenting condition of seclusion in his work Alone – a backdrop of sickly blue miniature tiles playing host to a lone soap tray and its counterpart soap bar. Here, Attard puts forward a portrait of a period of time; signifying the inescapability of the pandemic’s isolating enforcement. During this period, quarantine of the body extended to quarantine of selfhood. Introspection and hyper-self-analysis usurped the conventional regularities of thought and experience. But Alone also eulogises the spirit of the singular warrior – the independent soldier whose aim is exclusively to cleanse the world of moral injustice. Alone is both us, stranded in isolation, and a journalist working independently. It is anyone who opposes and seeks to stamp out the world’s most deadly contaminants.