In a spring exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv, For Want of (not) Measuring, curated by Vince Briffa with Alexander Zammit, 10 local and international artists explore our everyday use of systems and scales, contesting the act of measurement as absolute.
We live in a world where our every pulse, post and payback is distilled into a digit, yet we are more than the sum of our scores: the glitch in the system is the shape and size of the infinite human spirit.
From our overarching morals to the stresses we wrestle every day, core elements in our daily lives defy statistics. There’s beauty in love, loss, fear, courage and wonder that refuses to be calculated, and value in the feelings that form the human experience.
And while we’ve tried to perfect the art of objective quantification in many realms, have we done so at the expense of the art of being?
Challenging the traditional view of measurement as straightforward tool for understanding, For Want of (not) Measuring probes the problematic in our calculations of time and place, and surveys the sphere of the subjective.
Through pen and paint, sculpture, photography, installation, film and sound, this collection of work delves beyond the mere physical, exploring the way we gauge ideas, spirit, emotion and memory and the complex nature of reality, and inviting us all to reconsider the way we understand and judge ourselves and the landscape around us.
Unexpected in a world of definitive lines and scientific precision stands In the Balance by Trevor Borg, a 2.8-metre sculpture featuring a monumental skull precariously balanced atop a pedestal. It places the importance of a life force, the mind and the past into the heart of the show, while hinting at both material tension and a condition of delicate negotiation where structure, pressure and relation are quietly and immeasurably charged.
A reflection on the fragile state of our planet and its diverse ecology that hangs in the balance, it speaks of an everyday need for both an immediate spatial awareness and a wider systems instability. What appears measurable, and what remains shifting, unresolved or just out of reach?
Alongside, Yanyun Chen presents a series of 12 welded stainless steel and gold leaf works, We Do Not Scar Within Set Boundaries, reminding us that understanding often emerges from uncertainty rather than precision. Critiquing notions of perfection, social and hierarchical expectations, her grid etchings comprise lined and dotted grids, as used in schools for graph plotting and writing practice, overlaid with unruly, aggressive scars.
With the striking contrast between these bulging blemishes and the underlying geometry of flat and supposedly infallible measuring systems, she emphasises the intrigue and legacy of the stories that write us.
With a sense of the fleeting, Irish artist Kristina Huxley’s Sensitive Paintings are a series of works that explore perception, indeterminacy, states of change and flux as constants. She describes her practice as an act of collaboration between tradition and technology, running perpendicular to our digitally imaged saturated world. Her work is driven by encounters with live ecological, political and cultural systems observed in an unstable and volatile world.
“They make measure without words or metric, and hold the space between what is visible and invisible; what is expected and not delivered; the experience between reality and illusion, and the chasm that exists between our sense of having and not having control,” she says.
Other works in this stretching show include a giant contemplative painting In the Waiting by Gozo’s Katie Sims, who interrogates emotional states and sensation with a vigour hidden within a swathe of quiet earthy-brown; and an installation of drawings, text and photographs by UK-based artists Jim Hobbs and Patrick Adam Jones that blends scientific hypothesis, assumptions and created truths; and Alessandro Aiello’s Granular Storm.
The latter is a 30-minute audiovisual performance built through real-time sampling and granular synthesis in which fragments of field recordings, voices, readings, film audio and music, seen as flickering frequencies, dots and circles, are broken down and reassembled.
Aiello’s practice perches at the boundary of listening and viewing, and visitors can ‘almost watch the sound and listen to the image’ as they muse on whether sound is simply discrete vibrations in the air travelling down an ear canal or an unbounded space to inhabit.
In a contradictory space that’s both age-old yet fresh and contemporary, where a 100-metre walk into the bastion from Valletta’s busy street has transported you a world away, For Want of (not) Measuring certainly provides plenty of room for thought.
Recognising that measurement systems do not always offer certainty matters not only for scientific accuracy, it appears, but also for the way in which we approach knowledge and understanding across all fields from data analysis to artistic expression.
This project is supported by the Department of Digital Arts (University of Malta). The exhibition runs at Space C, Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, until May 3.