Malta from a distance

The day that Trump came to Brussels was eerily quiet. He brought his "political pornography" to town on a public holiday. My workplace for the day, BOZAR, Centre for the Fine Arts, was open but empty. The only people working appeared to be security men. My young citizen journalist colleague met me at the appointed time but felt so vulnerable that our Brussels connection advised her to go home.

I used my badge to gain entry to to the Pol Bury exhibition and to Malta, Land of Sea. Each exhibition is fascinating and together they set my brain whirling.

I have seen so many exhibitions in the two short weeks I have been here. The previous weekend, I loved Singing Brussels, also held at BOZAR, when local choirs invited visitors to sing with them. I felt that locals were inviting me into their space. The exhibitions have been International and most of them I could never hope to see in Malta. Even Malta, Land of Sea, would perhaps be different viewed in the context of Malta.

So my whirling brain has been circling the relationship between the local and the global, between thinking and action.

Around BOZAR square, hoardings mask development of some sort. A series of street portraits, perhaps of identities that would be recognised by local people, turn the square into an outdoor gallery. Each portrait is presented in a different style and one is distorted in a particular way. It draws my eye each time I walk here from my flat in the Arab quarter. In the Pol Bury exhibition, I understood the local influence on that particular portrait.

I did not know the work of local artist, Pol Bury, before and I was entranced by his slowly, imperceptibly moving pieces: fine dots on thin wires bunching and separating like growing things; monumental steel forms that move according to ancient irrigation principles, local and global together.

Yet it was fame on a global level that brought the resources enabling the artist to explore expensive materials like metal. If I have to choose, I prefer his fine work with wire points and the slightly clunky movement of wood blocks. Perhaps I want my art to remain grounded in the local rather than taking on a global patina. I like to discover the local through the work of local artists, to feel a sense of place in the cultural processes whereby artists have both responded to and created the local.

Which brings me to Malta, Land of Sea. The exhibition is self-contained, introspective, focused on the small archipelago at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. The objects are juxtaposed according to line and form rather than following the chronological patterns of a retrospective. This is not an exhibition about the history of colonisation although most of the artists represented are not locals. Rather, the placing of pieces encourages the viewer, the flaneur, to consider the local in shaping the lines and forms given life through creative endeavour over millennia.

With catalogue in hand, today I return to Malta to vote in National elections for the first time. I wish I could vote according to art rather than artifice.