Two Moons and Two Suns
An exhibition proposed by the Fictive Archive Investigations – a collaborative multidisciplinary, international project and working group, led by artist Claire Ducène.
Thirteen artists from a wide range of disciplines offer a labyrinth of possibilities for the island archive and its fiction.
The archive (understood here as a repository of information relating to one or more individuals, an organisation or location) contributes to the construction of what we perceive as truth. It attests to a palpable past: its position is concrete, unassailable, authoritative. However, the archive’s selectivity alone betrays its inherent subjectivity. The processes of retaining, accumulating, sorting, acquiring, and cataloguing include absences, losses and destructions, as well as biases and assumptions, rendering the archive inherently incomplete, and always open-ended.
Archiving alters its subject: cataloguing displaces the object in favour of information, a process furthered by digitisation, which renders the physical object anachronistic, relegated to physical and economic fragility and irrelevance.
Interpretation and research, stemming from selected and subjectively mediated collections, inevitably extend narratives. The archive is thus inherently fictive.
For a historian, the archive may help to construct a historical truth; and for an artist, the archive can become a mine for creative research. Archived items may be used to challenge accepted truths, to create narrative and fiction, allowing the distinction between truth and fiction to become blurred. Documents can be altered, forged, placed and replaced; these fictive documents may support a fictitious reality, which allows artists to question our realities and imagine other possibilities.
The exhibition title Two Moons and Two Suns (Deux Lunes et Deux Soleils), evokes the duality of the gaze, and the uncanny state of the fictive archive. Although it has been possible to photograph the sight of two suns, known as «parhelion», this extremely rare phenomenon is often believed to exist only as a mirage channeled through a literary imagination and fictional tales.
Artists
Elise Billiard Pisani
Balthazar Blumberg
Josephine Burden
Anna Calleja
Céline Cuvelier
Katel Delia
Claire Ducène
Axel Fourmont
Bettina Hutschek
Margerita Pulè
Stéphanie Roland
Matthew Schembri
Raffaella Zammit
Curators
Claire Ducène & Margerita Pulè
Visual Identity
2point3
Design Intern
Camille Roman
Official Opening
Taking place on Thursday 3 July with the following programme:
6pm Film screening
Podesta Island | Stéphanie Roland
6:45pm Poetry reading
Poetry Maps | Matthew Schembri
7pm Exhibition opening & live concert
Qiegħ bla qiegħ – a bottomless seabed | Seta Kien
Two Moons and Two Suns is supported by Arts Council Malta and Wallonie Bruxelles International, and hosted by Malta Society of Arts.
The Symposium, taking place on 4 and 5 July, is supported by the Ministry of Finance Conference Scheme.
