Event & Being: Sliema’s R Gallery Launching New Contemporary Solo Show Tomorrow
Sliema’s R Gallery is gracing us with another show tomorrow, launching Event & Being, a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Norbert Francis Attard.
Curated by Julien Vinet, the upcoming exhibition is being regarded as a satellite show of ‘Soap To Think With’ at Gozo Contemporary, situated in Għarb, Gozo, in the spirit of being a cultural connector.
“An event does not vanish but continues to exist into being. It is not the act of the event that transforms, but the actions that ripple in its consequence,” the exhibition description reads.
“Event & Being exists in the echoes of culturally-defining moments that shape contemporary Malta. In this solo show, Norbert Francis Attard objectifies particular aftermaths in the exercise of power by transfixing and immortalizing them as we do in our collective consciousness.”
“Just as Theodor Adorno wrote about art as a simulacrum of life, operated in death, so are these bold impressions presented by Attard: ‘Artworks […] kill what they objectify, tearing it away from its context of immediacy and real life. They survive because they bring death’.”
“In this pool of thought, Event & Being births its subject into the physical and unresolved to the test of time, to evolve and expand in nuances and layers of meaning, like memory endlessly corrupting itself with each recollection.”
Norbert Francis Attard started as a self-taught painter and graphic artist before turning to installation art in 1998. He graduated in Architecture from the University of Malta in 1977, practicing the profession as an architect for twenty years until 1996.
He lived in Germany in 1978/1979 working with the firm ‘Licht in Raum’, directed by Johannes Dinnebier, one of Germany’s pioneers in light design.
Attard now focuses on a contemporary art practice that incorporates architecture, sculpture, photography, video, and installation, to explore his major interests in places and their memories.
He blurs the boundaries of these disciplines to incorporate the irreducible physicality of sites, and to explore their sedimented multiple layers of memory, treating them as a product of place, of social interaction, and as a generative process.
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