Interview /Exhibition / Malta March - June ‘20 AUSTRALIA
Giulia Privitelli interviews Australian artist Izabela Pluta, who will be exhibiting in Valletta this April.
B
y the end of the fifteenth century, Western European artists had already begun to perceive the forceful impact the development and understanding of linear perspective was to have on the future of painting. What this optic notion entailed, however, was not simply an accurate depiction of the ‘real’ world but, essentially, a distortion imposed by perspective on the real, tactile world. Distortion was necessary to awaken the imagination, to lure and, ultimately, persuade the mind of the viewer. Similarly, bringing an imaginary place into existence – stemming from the rediscovery of literature on mythical lands and civilisations – also came about in the fifteenth century, the quintessential age of exploration; it was a time when such ideas were transformed from a myth to a place to be discovered. Such, too, was it to be for Polish-born, Australia-based artist Izabela Pluta. “For me, the idea of ‘looking’ or searching for something – under the sea – became critical to this work, and took me diving”. Taking a deep breath, I put my pen to paper and, for a short while, dipped into her world. At the time of Izabela’s exploration and research at Iseki Point (known as the Yonaguni Monument) in Japan in early 2018 – a most unnerving, yet certainly defining experience – news of the fallen sea arch at Dwejra reached her ears, inciting quite an instantaneous link between two disparate events. Both events, however, were subjected to the phenomenological effect of time: the contrast between the slow, imperceptible movements of sinking and shifting landmass, and the sudden ‘traumatic’ collapse and altered nature of that same landmass. Water connects all shores, no matter how distant. Later that year, Izabela found herself plunging into the sea where the Azure Window once stood. Her exploration of the ruins of the sea arch was, ironically, if not amusingly, determined by another collapse of sorts: the drone used to gather footage devastatingly crashed, corrupting the data retrieved from the site. This corrupted ‘ruined’ data forms part of the three-channel video featuring in the Malta exhibition, and presents a ‘collage’ of the topographies of ruin: underwater footage of the site, the ruin itself, and the ruined data.
GIULIA PRIVITELLI
Of dives, distortions and disorientation:
Variable Depth, Shallow Water Izabela Pluta
No.10__ Artpaper / 026
Just as an atlas condenses the world and information about it into frames and pages bound together in a book, so too does an SD card. After capturing images at Dwejra, Izabela recalled how on the same storage card she found video footage recorded during her Marrgu residency programme. In 2018, Izabela was invited to live and work alongside local indigenous artists and leaders of the aboriginal community of Peppimenarti. “Being in that land and vastness has a particular effect on you, on how it makes you feel... a place of deep meaning that makes space for a unique experience of time”. Not unlike the sensation of being underwater, I thought. Earlier on in our conversation, I asked Izabela what the experience of time felt like in the ‘deep blue’. In a seemingly absurd set of connections, she had even considered for a moment to present some of these residency photographs in the Malta exhibition. In any case, these strange correlations led to an exchange of views on belonging and non-places. In light of where it all started – the symbol of mythical Atlantis as a non-place – the conversation seemed to be spiralling into something deeper. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, during the time Izabela was exploring underwater ruins, she was also creating contact negatives from a set of out-of-date atlases – a project that was partly displayed in the installation Figures of Slippage and Oscillation, at the Artspace Ideas Platform in Sydney, in