Review /Maltese Artists Venice 2022
SARAH CHIRCOP
Thriving in Uncertainty We are living uncertain times, just as so many did before us. Uncertainty is no new agent to the human condition, and yet it makes us feel as if the stable grounding of the past is disintegrating into a swamp of unknowable futures. How dreadfully exciting.
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he 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is titled The Milk of Dreams, a concept conceived and organised in a period of enormous instability and uncertainty. However, curator Cecilia Alemani established that this year’s Biennal; “is not an exhibition about the pandemic, but it inevitably registers the upheavals of our era. In times like this, as the history of La Biennale di Venezia clearly shows, art and artists can help us imagine new modes of coexistence and infinite new possibilities of transformation.” Whilst Malta participates with a pavilion titled Diplomazija astuta, primarily focussed on re-articulating Caravaggio’s seminal altarpiece The Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608), I feel it is essential to put into context the island’s vast and various output of artistic work during this time of such instability and uncertainty. Artists and creatives have continued to question and challenge the micro and macro worlds around them, all in an attempt to re-imagine new modes of co-existing and transforming. Born out of the pandemic’s upheaval and the digital age, Ryan Falzon is one of the island’s leading contemporary painters. In his Botanika series back in 2020 and his current exhibition Friends with Plants, Falzon’s work concerns plants and our personal experiences of isolation. Whilst we transitioned from the forced slow pace of life to the grim perspective of catastrophic death rates and the crippling uncertainty of a pandemic that was only ever meant to last a few weeks, plants kept filling and cluttering our indoor spaces, giving much-needed hope, tranquillity and growth to those who share space with them. His paintings Friends with Plants by Ryan Falzon
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