Austin Camilleri

Biography

In 2014 a bronze horse with three legs was placed in front of the Maltese Parliament building, near City Gate in Valletta. The work was called “Żieme”, and it was made by Austin Camilleri. It later travelled to Kalmar in Sweden (2016) and to Kraków (2021).

He was born in 1972 on Gozo, where his parents had also been born. His grandfather Wistin Camilleri (1885–1979) was the first artist in the family and came of a Maltese-French line. Camilleri studied at the University of Malta and at the Pietro Vannucci Academy in Perugia. He lives on Gozo and works mainly in Malta and Italy.

His early pieces are built on material and on family memory. In April 1998 he made a concrete wall installation for the church of St James on Gozo (“Sacredaustin”). In 1999 he covered various rocks on the Maltese islands with 22-carat gold leaf (“Stones”). The aluminium rosary “Leanbh=baby / Prayer” (2001–2002) is made of cast children’s heads in place of beads. In a 2003 installation (“Convalescence of an interrupted conundrum”) he showed his grandfather’s sculptures wrapped in plastic. Then the range widens. For “Deposition” (2006) he made a double video projection, shown at the Kulturzentrum in Konstanz. The oil painting “Kelmabejntnei” (2008) he never saw himself: he had it executed and hung in the gallery by means of a series of instructions sent by email. Nine marble busts of world dictators, covered in plaster, made up “Homo immortalis” (2011). Among other works are the embroidered piece “Milk” (2012) and a concept for a monument in the moat near Fort St Elmo, marking forty years since Malta became a republic (2014).

The series on stone are, to my mind, the most recognisable part of his practice. In 2017 rocks appeared across Malta and Gozo with seven texts carved into them: poems by six Maltese poets (Rużar Briffa, Norbert Bugeja, Claudia Gauci, Maria Grech Ganado, Adrian Grima, Daniel Massa) and by the band Brikkuni. The cycle “Nine” (2018) carried the idea further: poems cut into natural stone at a private residence in Wardija, on a cliff between Sannat and Munxar, in a quarry in Qali, on a concrete jetty on Comino, in the salt pans of Marsaxlokk, in the clay of Għar Qawqla on Gozo, in the soft rock of Fort St Elmo and on a building site in Mosta.

Among other projects are “Ghost trip series” (2015), a video and a series of works on paper shown at the Henderson Center in Beijing, and “Night has fallen” (2016–2017), an installation of physical and digital neon with real-time video, commissioned for the exhibition “Malta – Land of Sea” at BOZAR in Brussels. In 2015, together with Kenneth Spiteri, Mario Sammut and Tommi Zuegg, he made the performance “The Hate Politik”, which combined dance, music, visual art and theatre.

Camilleri has organised and curated exhibitions and often worked with writers, composers, actors, architects and choreographers. He is the founder of the project 356, a co-founder of StArt, the Klula Foundation and the ISTRA Foundation, and a visiting lecturer in the Faculty for the Built Environment at the University of Malta. His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Mediterranean Biennale, the Artraker Biennial and the Biennale of Young Artists. Venues include the Visual Arts Gallery in New Delhi, the Henderson Center in Beijing, CENTRALE and Place des Fontaines in Brussels, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cluj-Napoca, the Fondation Villa Datris in France, the Palais Liechtenstein in Feldkirch, the Vatican, the National Library in Rome, the United Nations headquarters and the SAI Gallery in New York, St James’s Palace in London, the Palais des Nations in Geneva, the Grote Kerk in The Hague and the church of Santa Chiara in San Marino. Public works have also been shown in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Tunis and La Marsa, Munich and Konstanz, and in Malta at the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Maritime Museum, the Archaeology Museum, the Il-Ħaġar Museum, Spazju Kreattiv and the Contemporary Art Foundation.