A packed hall of over 150 art lovers, artists, academics and friends of the newly unveiled Malta International Contemporary Arts Space gathered for an interview with the acclaimed Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, whose monumental works of art launched the MICAS Galleries.
MICAS Artistic Director Edith Devaney led proceedings at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, in a wide-ranging interview on Vasconcelos’s works on show at MICAS – Transcending the Domestic – which grouped together her signature works Tree Of Life, Garden of Eden, and Valkyrie Mumbet, as well as other works organised around the themes of domesticity, gender and cultural politics.
MICAS opened to the public on Sunday, 27 October.
“I hope this show will bring a lot of happiness to people and beauty to the city.” Vasconcelos said, entertaining her audience with stories that explored the genesis of her works, and paying tribute to the role of executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat in overcoming the challenges of setting up her show at MICAS.
“I have exhibited at a lot of historic places – the Guggenheim or Versailles Palace – but to actually ‘start’ a museum in Malta, has been a unique and magical experience… it’s a privilege for me to have started this, with the team led by Phyllis Muscat, whose energy has made this museum happen. Here I found a team of warriors, poets, and dreamers, with very high ambitions.”
The key theme of domesticity in Vasconcelos’s work is tied not just to the human condition, but to femininity and gender roles, with the artist having explored this through a trilogy of conceptual works.
“For years, I had been working on the relationships women nurture, as they build their future, change into mothers and grandmothers – and all over the world, this is marked through various symbols,” Vasconcelos said.
Vasconcelos’s choice of symbols were the engagement ring, the wedding dress, as well as the wedding cake – all present in her works Solitaire, The Bride, and Wedding Cake at Waddesdon Park, in the United Kingdom. Solitaire, which reproduces a diamond ring on a monumental scale, made up of 110 golden car rims and crowned by an inverted pyramid composed of 1,450 crystal whisky glasses,is displayed on the MICAS esplanade up until March 27.
Crucially, Vasconcelos spoke of her approach to scale, explaining how the monumentality of her works is determined by the size of the daily objects she picks, and which determine the eventual ‘decontextualising’ process. “I do not change the dimensions of the object itself – it is the object itself that shows me how many will be required to scale them into the decontextualised concept that I am building.”
Vasconcelos says her works take years to develop in her studio, which she described as a laboratory, testing the manner in which her ideas can be scaled into their final shape – Valkyrie Mumbet’s tentacle-like structure, which sprawls all across the entrance of MICAS, took 10 years to develop and construct.
At the same time, the sheer detail of embroidery and use of traditional crafts in her works, evident in her Valkyries series and Tree of Life – which towered all along the four-storey fortification walls at MICAS – adds rich, exuberant layers to her work.
The Tree of Life came to represent the spirit of regeneration after the COVID pandemic, during which the Vasconcelos team spent embroidering and hand-stitching its 110,000 fabric leaves, fungi, mosses and lichens, stumps and branches.
“Malta is truly the first time that The Tree of Life has truly come to life,” Vasconcelos said, recounting the teething problems of reconstructing her finished work at the Saint-Chappelle in Vincennes, France, and the challenges of powering the tree’s lights with its complex cablework during its showing at MAAT.
“This is a very special piece for me, and it will always be connected to me and my studio for its uniqueness, strength and hope,” Vasconcelos said, to applause from the audience.
Another theme explored by Vasconcelos’s Garden of Eden is that of the climate crisis – set in a darkened, dimmed room, viewers at MICAS cast their eyes on simple, artificial flowers, lit from beneath with a low-tech, rotating disc of fluorescent lights. The artificiality of this ‘garden’ conjures up a dark future, where technology ominously powers an absence of nature.
Vasconcelos said her works allow viewers to connect the symbolism of her work, with a certain physicality and feeling, where people are invited to walk through her work and contemplate the questions that her works elicit. “It is the viewer who activates these works – if they are not there, the piece itself is not completed. If people do not look closely at them, they cannot perceive their monumentality… being part of the work is the experience.”
