GROUP EXHIBITION

Participating Artists: Maria Azzopardi, Andrew Borg Wirth, Isaac Buttigieg, Lucia Calleja, Jean Ebejer, Suzi Mifsud, Tracey Sammut, Felic Micallef, Matthew Scerri, Nick Theuma, Mike Zerafa

Project Summary

• 11 architecture students who joined University 10 years ago and today each have very different individual practices, come together within the spaces at Valletta Contemporary

• Investigations into the theme of entropy and the role of the architect in society

• These works are the result of an intensively collaborative period over the past six months, where the group has assembled to research, discuss observations and share processes

• Artworks include flat works, sculpture, installation, soundscape and media works

• Curated by architect and curator Andrew Borg Wirth (@aborgwirthwww.andrewborgwirth.com)

• Hosted by Valletta Contemporary (@vallettacontemporary__malta,www.vallettacontemporary.com)

• Supported by Bureau 105, Halmann Vella, the Faculty for the Built Environment, Openworkstudio, Camilleri Paris Mode, Debono Group and Bank of Valletta.

Curatorial Note

****The second law of thermodynamics states that as energy is transformed, it incrementally dissipates and tends towards loss, decay and waste. This is the process of entropy; a process of mutual construction and demolition—and an admission that time is perhaps the most present and yet seemingly most anonymous protagonist in the physics of production. It applies to societies and to systems, as it does to our natural environment, and has generated curiosity since its peak in art production in the sixties.

It is a meta-narrative for our more micro realities to perform against. This exhibition invites ten architects who collectively started architecture school a decade ago to investigate trajectories of this narrative in their daily grind. The group has come together and dissipated at different times across the past ten years, making their own growth an entropic process in itself.

In processes of construction, climate adaptation, planning, real estate, monument-making, and cultural production, architecture plays a mediating role. The architect is an agent of how time performs within built and unbuilt environments. Challenging the role of the architect and transposing it within the context of a contemporary art gallery, the group is presenting independent works that illustrate its collective understanding of where and how entropy persists—and when and why architecture needs to perform.

Studying, graduating and working at a time of accelerated progress has made this a formative decade for the exhibiting group. The interests of the project are to provoke the definitions of the architect and re-examine the role it has in contemporary society. Using diverse media, the group of architects will occupy the contemporary art space to operate in ways that the industry or confines of the profession do not always allow it to. Returning to a position of critique, the exhibition assembles itself as a collective of individual findings, transforming the galleries at Valletta Contemporary into places for the introspection of theMaltese built and unbuilt context. This, through the lens of the youngest of Malta's generation of architects.

With special thanks to Bureau 105, Halmann Vella, the Faculty for the Built Environment,Openworkstudio, Camilleri Paris Mode, Debono Group and Bank of Valletta.