Variable depth, shallow water

Variable depth, shallow water

Spazju Kreattiv, St James Cavalier, Valletta
Curators: Nicole Bearman and Francesca Mangion
5 March–11 April 2021
Catalogue

To dive is to embrace groundlessness, immediately shifting our perspective away from the landlocked, inhibiting our language, and augmenting our breath. Diving is an innately mediated experience; wetsuits, tanks, goggles, inflatable vests, cages, flippers, and weighted belts are all apparatus that assist bodies to descend or surface. Technology has given way to increasingly crisp and lifelike underwater imagery; however, at times it is impossible to capture the depth of colour and the density of the water.

Pluta’s Variable depth, shallow water is a tangible attempt at addressing the fragmentation of vision under the surface. Capturing the innately disorienting rehabituation that takes place underwater, picture planes descend, hang and jut up from the cage-like structure. The primary images are of the Azure Window, in Gozo, a small island off Malta. Rising 28 metres out of the sea, the famous arch developed from wave erosion on the rocky cliff face. Known in Maltese as Tieqa-Tad Dwerja, the sea stack was a popular tourist destination until its collapse after intense storms in 2017. Pluta heard about the collapse in 2018, and being a diver, she made her way to film the submerged natural ruin, now roughly 12 metres below the surface of the ocean. She filmed both above with a drone and below with a camera, charting the depths of both her descent and of the fragmented Dwerja. 

It is not known exactly when the arch came to being, but the entire process of erosion is believed to have taken around 500 years. Relatively short in geologic time, witnessing the final collapse of the arch in our lifetime has become a metaphor for ecosystem collapse and the rapid acceleration of climate change in our epoch. Dwerja’s collapse represents planetary scale reduced to an instant; a realtime before and after. In this way, Variable depth, shallow water is a ruin, the disassembled and mutable space of memory informed by deep time, loss of site: a monument submerged.
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Variable depth, shallow water is an exhibition of new work by Izabela Pluta, a Polish-born, Australian-based artist, who uses photography to interpret and re-conceptualise the role performed by images today. Visiting the recently-fallen sea stack Dwerja, also known as The Azure Window, on the island of Gozo, Pluta was captivated by what was one of the world’s most spectacular expressions of geological time. Dwejra, an underwater debris of limestone rock – originally 28-metres tall – now lies about 12 meters below sea level. 

Drawing on the reflexivity of the photographic medium, Pluta uses images, video, objects and sound. The installation’s key material includes corrupted data, filmed using a drone lost at sea and subsequently retrieved. Inspired by Dwerja, the concept of deep time, the instantaneous moment of change, and informed by her own passage as a migrant to Australia, the work investigates the uncertainty of location.

Variable depth, shallow water brings together disparate elements comprising handmade contact negatives of unhinged atlases, faux-artefacts cast in bronze from the depths of where the Pacific Ocean and East China Sea meet, footage from the vast Australian landscape, and neon components that implode in on themselves. This is the first time the artist has exhibited in Malta. 

PUBLC PROGRAMME
10 March 2021, 19:00
Panel discussion with Moderator Ranier Fsadni, and panel Izabela Pluta, Jon Banthorpe, and Margerita Pulè.

2 April 2021, 19:00
Art Additives programme of short films by artists including Charles & Ray Eames, Jananne Al-Ani, Ben Thorp Brown, Raquel Ormella and Lynne Roberts-Goodwin. The film screening has been curated in collaboration with Ellie Buttrose, Curator, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, the exhibition curators and artist.

This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and supported by a UNSW Art & Design Faculty Research Grant.