This installation embarks on a captivating dialogue between data, photography, and music. Drawing from her experiences as a diver, Katel explores the liminal moment between being under the water and resurfacing to the air. This unique state - poised between the depths and the surface, where the shifting weight of the body becomes acutely palpable - is significant; through meticulous documentation of these moments, the artist has built a palette of colours, textures, and emotions.
Each of these images is associated with a specific sea level record around the island of Malta; together forming a collection of ‘slides’ or ‘samples’ of the sea.
The transparent box placed on the ground evokes not only the methodical order of archival storage, but also references the scientific principles of chromatography, where substances are separated as they move through different phases, revealing distinct characteristics. Just as different substances travel at varying speeds, the photographic ‘slides’ offer diverse perspectives on the sea’s subtle movements.
The work’s sense of fluidity and transgression is further amplified by the accompanying sound piece, specially created by Kurt Buttigieg, which influences the visitor’s perception and immersion in the work.
Installation part of Two Moons and Two Suns exhibition at Malta Society of Arts, 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.
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.