Between mid-January and late February, every day at sunset, the Anchorage Museum in Alaska showcased Mediterranean and Maltese artist Austin Camilleri’s work on the main façade of the museum building.

The chosen video artwork entitled Issa Dalam – Night has Fallen has now engaged with context-based narratives informed by and complimenting the Anchorage Museum’s vision and ambition to spearhead global conversations around climate change action.

Camilleri is certainly no new name to the local art scene and increasingly so to the international art scene. His multidisciplinary practice, including installation and video along with painting and sculpture, recently showcased at the exhibition LE.IVA | Anger is a lazy form of grief held at Spazju Kreattiv.

The exhibition project, curated by international curator Rosa Martinez and colleague Irene Biolchini, spelled a return to the local art scene for the artist after close to a decade but is only the latest in a series of international projects where the artist is increasingly present, at times leading or contributing to.  At the Anchorage Museum, Camilleri is the latest in-residence international artist joining a line-up of designers, filmmakers, scholars and researchers, sound artists and musicians, writers, poets and curators connecting the Anchorage Museum to the world. Issa Dalam is but Austin’s introductory piece at the Anchorage, joining the rich community of thinkers, creative practitioners and changemakers working with this museum.

Time is used as a way of investigating transience and timelessness in an ever-changing oceanic landscape.

Issa Dalam was originally commissioned to Camilleri for a major exhibition held at BOZAR in Brussels in early 2017 celebrating Malta’s six-month presidency of the Council of Ministers of the European Union. Back then, it wedged comfortably within a broader and more articulate narrative of Malta’s territorial identity – land and sea combined and extended into one. At BOZAR, the piece was also in dialogue with a Maltese traditional tal-lira clock. On David Chipperfield’s façade at the Anchorage Museum, Issa Dalam presents the Mediterranean Sea as a seascape that paradoxically unites and divides.

Horizons may still become threatening barriers as well as destinations for future hope. It is the same sea that facilitates the movement and interaction of people, ideas and ecosystems.

At Anchorage, the contrast is paradoxically beautiful, not only of the warmth of the Mediterranean Sea set against the wintry cold of the snowy landscape at Anchorage. On a deeper level, it stands as an artistic statement pronounced by a Mediterranean artist in the Arctic North where climate change is not considered solely and exclusively as a regional issue but more akin to the tangible evidence of a global, rapidly-increasing challenge.

The work uses time as a way of investigating transience and timelessness in an ever-changing oceanic landscape

For Issa Dalam, time is of the essence and at Anchorage, it is unequivocally Maltese. The work uses time as a way of investigating transience and timelessness in an ever-changing oceanic landscape. The video strikes a regular tone of movement as written time changes to real-time in continuous motion much like the gentle waves that slowly but surely reach the shore where they shimmer back into the waters from which they rose. Time and place define Austin’s piece akin to a clock which now marks Alaska time in Maltese, underscoring its Semitico-Mediterranean origins taking on a representational role on behalf of the Mediterranean rather than just specifically Malta.

Clocks mark time – ħin in Maltese – over the passing of time – żmien in Maltese. The rhythm of the video alludes to traditional bell clocks, widely in use in the Mediterranean, where the strike is on the quarter hour rather than on the second. At Anchorage, therefore, Issa Dalam presents the essence of the Mediterranean through Malta’s identity.

This project is a first for a Maltese and Malta-based artist in the Arctic Circle where the Anchorage is the leading, forward-looking museum institution. The museum, first inaugurated in 1968, has grown steadily over the years in both collections and international stature as it seeks to envision itself as a place of ideas and transformation, narratives and perspectives, resilient and relevant communities responsive to a rapidly changing world toward a better future for all.

As a permanent institution, the Anchorage Museum tells the story of Alaska and the North thanks to a series of art galleries some of which also present thematic narratives posing critical questions rather than assuming answers. Since 1992, it is also a Smithsonian affiliate museum and home to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s Arctic Studies Centre which supports the museum’s mission through research, education and exhibitions.

The Anchorage Museum in Alaska

At the end of the spectrum of the Anchorage Museum’s initiatives, projects and commitments stand the SEED Lab building. This has been conceived as a space for innovation advocating community conversations. Indeed, the Anchorage is both global and local at the same time.

Camilleri’s work is comfortably in line with the museum’s ethos, vision and ambition. As the Anchorage increasingly seeks to stand for people, place and planet with a strategic emphasis on meaningful climate-change action, artists and creatives are the ones helping the museum spearhead conversations around these topics that are global albeit also local.

As CEO Julie Decker aptly states: “Here, towards the top of the world, we know that our imperative is to play a role in finding new ways of telling the story of our place, and what our place might mean for the rest of the world.”

At the Anchorage Museum, Austin’s Issa Dalam has also contributed to these global conversations.

Sandro Debono is an international advisory board member – Anchorage Museum, Alaska.