Maltese artist Caesar Attard admits to having created a career out of thinking unconventionally, and of reacting to reality by introducing alternative actions as the basis for his art. Conceiving of participatory works that for their pseudoscientific agenda, were only ever intended to record his audience’s inertia. As an artist driven by ‘bouts of acute naivety’, and a weakness for the arbitrary, Attard has more often seen certainty as somehow surrendering oneself to a figured out and foreseeable future. Having, throughout his practice, created a canon of drawings and sculptures, it is Attard’s works by instruction that define him for their never being entirely about the outcome, but intrinsically, more about the process of applying very arbitrary ideas to everything we understand as real – as a respite from a more mundane outcome.
The MICAS in Conversation is a series of short conversations between art critic Rajesh Punj and a selection of Maltese and international artists on the involving effect of space on their art practice against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications.
MICAS is a Government of Malta infrastructural legacy project for the Culture and the Arts sector. MICAS will be realised through state funded restoration of historical fortifications and its galleries will be delivered in 2023. This project is part-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund – European Structural and Investment Funds 2014-2020.
