A visual arts exhibition at the Maritime Museum around the theme of migration is the next phase in the Bodyless project.

The exhibition presents works by Teresa Sciberras, Matthew Attard, Maxine Attard, Sandro Spina and Aaron Bezzina. It puts forward a visual dialogue ranging from issues of where one’s home is, to one’s origins, to a more speculative scenario where the exhibition viewer becomes a migrant himself through a virtual reality game.

Born in Nigeria, Teresa Sciberras’s work Things Fall Apart: Documents of Home consists of a series of five charcoal drawings and five photographic slides imbued with a sense of suspended absence, precariousness and impermanence.

Aaron Bezzina’s Ċattra fuq l-art ma tiswa xejn presents a sand-filled life-jacket displayed behind glass underneath a trio of suspended jerry-cans. The life jacket weighs over 60 kilos making it a useless if not paradoxical object in itself. The whole work is a powerful comment on the terrain between buoyancy and sinking. How does one stay afloat when all the odds are against you?

For the past 18 months, Bodyless has been looking into the narratives that surround the migration of Africans northwards. It was designed to start from documentative research and then move on to an interpretative and artistic approach to narratives, with a special focus on retelling those narratives.

The stories had to be associated with individual human lives and faces, names, addresses, homes and families as opposed to presenting them merely as clumps

of cold statistics. As the project developed, a new sub-theme emerged: that of spectatorship focusing on how these narratives

are presented to us and how we choose to consume them and, on occasion, engage with them.

The first phase of Bodyless saw the launch of Never Arrive, the chronicles of a Somali boy, Farah Abdullahi Abdi, who fled his home alone due to gender identity issues and ended up in Malta. The second phase consisted of another book, this time of

Maltese poetry which builds on Never Arrive and which focuses mainly on moral

spectatorship. The book, Iswed Assolut, is by Glen Calleja who is also coordinating the third phase of the project, the Bodyless visual arts exhibition.

 

■ The exhibition is being held at the Maritime Museum in Vittoriosa until Sunday, October 16. Bodyless is a project by Kopin, a Maltese child rights and development NGO which continues to advocate for social

justice and fundamental human rights. The project is supported by the Arts Council Malta – Malta Arts Fund, UNHCR Malta, IOM Malta, the Embassy of the United States of America in Malta, Emmanuel Delicata Winemakers, the Terre des Hommes International Federation and the Destination Unknown Campaign.  Further information about the project can be found on Facebook or at www.kopin.org.

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