Dream Welding
An exhibition by Leo Chircop
Portraits daze with their unexpected composition – a body posed in lovely and rueful postures locked in an enigmatic reverie. A crash between traditional painting and the human nude. Bodies glint, oil-like. The sea occupies a transversal position in Chircop’s Dream Welding – a series of photographs presented at the Malta Society of Arts in Valletta. Figuring in the background, the sea hinges between subject and object. At once the skin and the organ of the image. In recent and growing discourse on the posthuman and on critical attention on the blueprint of the body, the sea has proven to be revelatory along with notions of fluidity and porosity. It has, then, held a definitive position of indefinity. Scholar Rosi Braidotti, wrote of the boundlessness of the human subject in her 2013 book The Posthuman: “Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.” Luce Irigaray’s recent attention to elemental milieux reminds us of our watery beginnings: “So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth,” and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis has been working on planetary waters and corporeality, sounding the bell for a hydrological turn – “We – in the broadest of senses – all have water in common.” A perhaps hackneyed subject, the sea is always there, but Chircop’s images promise that its existence equals transformation – and it is never only there but always also here. Ever so interested in the politics and mechanics of change, Virginia Woolf has Bernard say in The Waves: “I am made and remade continually”.
Image: Dream Welding I, 2025-26, Leo Chircop
Words by Warren Bartolo
Visual design by Garigue Studio
