Malta Contemporary Art is presenting an exhibition, titled Correspondences, a project that links a programme of nine exhibitions presented in Portugal, Spain, Germany and Malta to an international colloquium held at Casa das Artes, Oporto, Portugal.
A letter excerpt included in Jacques Derrida’s La Carte Postale (1980) is taken as areference for the Correspondences project.
In this fragment, dated June 5, 1977, Derrida says: “What I like most about postcards is that we do not know what is in front and what is back, here or there, near or far, Plato or Socrates, face or reverse. Nor what is more important � the image or the text or, within the text, the message, the caption or the address.”
The postcard is taken as producer of subjectivity, process and life experience, itself an arrangement of correspondences, attempting not only to explore its linguistic, grammatical and rhetorical character, but also the use value it can acquire when integrated within a chain of possible situations.
A metaphor for equality, with no face or reverse, here or there, image or text, the postcard exists in this traffic of sent, received, registered, circumvented, returned, stolen, lost, anonymous, confidential or inviolable correspondence.
Correspondences also refers to connection, communication, relation, path, journey, route, complementariness and reciprocity.
Multiple forms, multiple uses, setting ambivalences in motion, breaking with directions, departure and arrival, beginning and end, artwork and space, signified and signifier.
Assuming that it becomes imperative to force language, to break it, to disfigure it, to force concepts to say something else, this project adopts the postcard as an open letter, with no secrets, no face or reverse, a figure operating in speech, in a movement against the origin, establishing the conditions of its impossibility.
The exhibition, curated by Eduarda Neves, features Amarante Abramovici, João Vasco Paiva, Maria Covadonga Barreiro, Sérgio Leitão and Tânia Dinis.
Malta Contemporary Art was set up in 2008 by artist and curator Mark Mangion. Between 2008 and 2011, MCA established itself as the foremost forum for contemporary art in Malta, collaborating with over 100 artists and other professionals in over 20 exhibitions, projects and events including Simon Starling, Cyprien Gaillard, Spartacus Chetwynd and Jess Flood-Paddock.
The exhibition is ongoing until August 30 from Wednesday to Saturday from 10am to 2pm at Malta Contemporary Art, 24/5, St Ursula Street, Valletta.