Two events organised by artist Raphael Vella will be held at St James Cavalier, Valletta, on Thursday to offer the public two rather different answers to the question:Does it still make sense to speak oftradition?
Contemporary visual artists are increasingly making reference to global or cross-cultural ideas and media rather than national identities. Nomadic artists from smaller, peripheral areas of the art world travel to or buy studios in larger, more central cities and bring together sources they have picked up in different contexts.
The proliferation of biennials around the world contributes to the dissemination of global technologies that are now playing a significant role in contemporary artistic practices.
Artist Helidon Gjergji is representative of the nomadic artist, having been born in Albania and now living between Rome, New York and Tirana. His artistic studies were also diverse: he received degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tirana as well as the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples and an MFA from Northwestern University, Chicago.
Gjergji will discuss his video installations and other works, including works he produced for the Venice Biennale, the Venice Biennale of Architecture and Manifesta.
Gjergji’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, Flash Art, Domus, Exibart and several other journals, and he has lectured about his work at Harvard University, the American University in Dubai and other academic institutions.
The artist’s talk forms part of the ‘Contemporary Art in Dialogue with...’ series organised by Raphael Vella, and will be held between 7 and 8 p.m.
The talk will be followed by a performance and exhibition of two Japanese artists’ works in the Main Hall at St James Cavalier, starting at 8.15 p.m.
Tarohei and Matsumi Nakagawa will show Japanese calligraphy on silk cloth and will demonstrate some basic calligraphic techniques. Tarohei Nakagawa is also a prolific photographer and will also show two of his photographs in an exhibition opening the next evening at the National Museum of Fine Arts.
Both events are free.