Artist Victor Agius

The Ġgantija Project started in June 2013 as a collaboration between Victor Agius and com-poser Mariella Cassar Cordina, together with writer and poet Immanuel Mifsud.

The project was divided in three phases which included a performance at Ġgantija Temples, a series of workshops and hands-on activities and the final exhibition and performance at St James Cavalier in Valletta.

This interdisciplinary project, curated by Vince Briffa, included visual art, contemporary music composition and literature in a dialogue with the Ġgantija heritage. Both performances were executed by the Ars Vitae Ensemble.

The young contemporary Gozitan artist, Victor Agius, is an artist who is still inspired by Maltese prehistoric art. In recent years, Agius’s art shifted from two-dimensional expression to a sculptural or installation form of representation.

For this project, which took more than a year, the artist created a number of installations and clay sculptures to convey a spiritual message and to make us aware of the “negative sculptural space of both the industrial as well as the natural objects”.

In the first hall at St James Cavalier one could see sculpture-moulds in clay of rocks and industrial objects which suggest a metaphoric link with the shapes of the structure of the Neolithic temples. Agius successfully incorporated a sense of ritual in these works. The spaces were used as a means of entering into a dialogue with mystery and the sacred.

In the second room was a video projection documenting the performance held at the temples last year, which included music written by composer Cassar Cordina and the light and sculptural installations at various spots of the temples by Agius. There were also large display tables showing initial designs, sketches and music notes from the artist and the composer and also journals and poetry by Mifsud.

In this year’s exhibition, in the third hall at St James Cavalier Gallery, Agius included a series of 3D paintings with the earth, which represent sacred matter. These works were made with soil, shrubs, rocks, sand and clay.

The most impressive artworks in this final exhibition were the gigantic boulders or spherical sculptures found in the last hall

There was also a huge mural called Terrae. This sizable work featured large irregular plaques of clay, earth, soil and sand relief sculptures executed with raw, earthy colours. The materials used suggest a primitivistic affinity with the work of ancient people and prehistoric models.

The most impressive artworks in this final exhibition were the gigantic boulders or spherical sculptures found in the last hall. The artist produced and presented three large sculptures made with Gozitan blue clay. Metaphorically, the size of the works symbolise the monumentality of the boulders and megaliths of the Ġgantija Temples and their rotund and oval shapes are a reference to eternity, to the void, to the unconscious.

The concept of clay and the human body with the earth is not new in modernist and post-modernist art. Artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Mary Beth Edelson, Keith Arnatt, Ana Mandieta and others had some form of ritualistic connections with the earth.

In the last hall there was also a photographic documentation of a performance which the artist recorded in 2010 named Pulverem Project.

In this ritualistic performance, the artist applied clay and mud to his body inside his family’s grave, thus emphasising that we are part of the earth and that to dust we shall return. The artist’s ritualistic act of self-covering with mud and clay amplified his personal dimension to the sacred. The concept of this work could also be seen in this hall which contained the large monumental clay sculptures.

Agius’s work has shamanic traits, like the work of prehistoric artists. He is actually engaged on a personal mission, searching for the sacred in what he sees as material. It is a form of animism, which explains that the artist sees that everything on earth has a spiritual essence. He takes the role of a contemporary shaman to act as an intermediary between the visible and invisible worlds.

In this exhibition, the monumental earth sculptures, plaques and relief paintings abolished the conventional concept of vertical, upright and figurative depiction of sculpture by being produced for the viewers within a temporary space. The organic works were placed directly on the gallery floor and hung without any framing on the walls or placed on shelves to challenge and contrast the minimal white walls of the upper galleries.

I saw this exhibition as not just for art’s sake but also as a reminder of our own state of materialism and all the things we experience in our negative current crisis and lack of spiritual values.