A collective exhibition, New Weapons, is being held at Blitz in Valletta in collaboration with Central Saint Martins University of the Arts, London.
It offers an exploration of the proliferation of the networked image in an online environment and the idea that an image can be in many places simultaneously – on your smartphone and your laptop, in Europe and Asia, on Google and Facebook.
The exhibition promotes the idea that there is no original, only versions. The organisers say New Weapons is the first exhibition worldwide to fully embrace the photographic concept of the network by existing in multiple versions in multiple locations.
Blitz director Alexandra Pace is a recent graduate of the CSM MA programme and has established an ongoing professional relationship with the university.
Through this collaboration, Blitz is supporting CSM students by inviting them to use the space as a remote location to explore the simultaneous existence of the contemporary image.
New Weapons is not simply the dismantling of one exhibition to take it to another location. Rather, it is about simultaneity and multiplicity.
On May 13, a container at CSM was loaded with artworks created for the exhibition in Malta. Two weeks later, when the CSM end-of- year degree show was opened to the public, a screen at the entrance to the gallery showed a live map and GPS tracking of the container ship’s movements.
This screen was part of an artwork entitled Mare Nostrum, by Bonamy Devas, one of the artists featured in the New Weapons show.
Devas’s installation at Central Saint Martins in London was a dispersed artwork that explores the structure and nature of networks.
As the container travelled by sea to Valletta, the live location data from the ship’s navigation system controlled a laser, literally drawing with light onto a surface of phosphorescent paint that leaves a transient trace. As the ship nears Malta the data feed from its navigation system is disrupted by the location data of all the migrant shipwrecks that have taken place during the two years of the MA course.
The Central Saint Martins Photography MA group is operating in terrain that understands the visual image in philosophical terms – multi-dimensional, process-driven and defragmented – in short, beyond a linear rhet-oric of content, measurement and description.
These artists’ work experiments with sound, video, data feeds and sculpture, which collectively indicate the complex terrain of the visual image which they are investigating.
The exhibition New Weapons runs until next Sunday.
Crowd-funding intiative launched
Blitz has also launched a crowd-funding campaign in order to raise funds for two long-term programmes which support local and international contemporary arts practice.
The first is Project Space, a dedicated space for a high-turnaround exhibition programme. A platform for emerging, experimental practitioners who are challenging what it means to make art nowadays.
The second project is Reside, designed and constructed by architecture students from the University of Malta and supported by 808 Foundation. This project revolves around a half-finished, self-contained apartment that lies inside Blitz and is intended to host international talent to Malta for engagement with the local scene.
Supporters can pledge any amount through www.makeuscount.com until July 1. A group of local artists have donated limited edition art, created and produced exclusively for Blitz to reward those who donate.