Daily Bread takes its lead from systems of clientelism and corruption within societies. It makes reference to bread and salt as indispensable parts of life, but also refers to the double-meaning of dough in terms of money and the value of salt in history.
Daily Bread is an exhibition of work by Letta Shtohryn and Margerita Pulè at historic windmill in Birkirkara, run by the Gabriel Caruana Foundation, The Mill. Both artists will use an interdisciplinary approach, working in digital media, installation, sculpture and performance.
Letta Shtohryn’s work is a spatial algorithmic-suggestions-trail starting with bread, and leading to salt, ritual and politics. It’s a plateau of semi-connected meanings and associations, sprouting to various directions. Her new work looks at metaphorical connotations with daily bread as well as at the ‘thing itself’; bread as a catalyst of revolutions and bread as a tool for political rituals. The trail starts with the daily bread of internet giants, routinely data mining markers of our mental state, political preferences and position in society to distribute ads to us, simplifying our complex lives by categorisation. Can the algorithm be the ones to know whether a politician is corrupt by offering frequent flyer discounts to Panama?
Margerita Pulè’s work refers to the secrecy which encircles corruption, the implicit class systems that exist within society and how bribery, behaviours and prejudices can influence everyday transactions. Her installation asks audiences to participate, to place a (secret) value on the price of their bread, and possibly allow themselves to be valued in the process. Each transaction – the audience member’s proposal and the artist’s subsequent assessment – reflects how perceptions are formed, how societies rate an individuals’ status, and how more secretive, clandestine deals are formed. The work plays on bread’s centrality in human civilisation; a lack of it can lead to revolution, but a surplus can serve to pacify populations.
Venue: The Mill – Art, Culture and Crafts Centre, Birkirkara
Dates: Thursday 1 August to Wednesday 14 August, 2019
Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 17:00 to 20:00 except Thursday 1st August (19:00 – 22:00), 9th August (19:00 – 22:00) and 14th August (19:00 – 22:00)
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/321444228787914/
Artist bios:
Margerita Pulè
Margerita Pulè’s artistic practice attempts to exist outside the conventional structure and aesthetic of the exhibition space and seeks to interact and gain meaning through other modes of existence such as interventions and temporal events. Her artistic practice is on www.projectdisintegration.org.
Recent exhibitions include Land Politics, Valletta Contemporary & The Cement Bakery at Mahalla Festival.
Letta Shtohryn
Concerned with our relationship with the digital realm, Letta Shtohryn explores our intertwined coexistence with it. As a method, she employs speculative strategies, poetics and metaphysical investigations responding to aspects of the digital culture using technology that she finds familiarity with – from video games to machine learning.
Operating in the area of the “post-digital”, Letta Shtohryn utilises critical media reflections linking the digital with the tangible, the historic with the current projecting subtle feminist undertones. Letta’s work can be found on the intersection between the digital and the human coexisting in a world increasingly governed by algorithms.
Recent exhibitions / residencies include : Object, Objetc, Objecc, Spazju Kreattiv, MT; Algorithmic Oracle at Vanity Projects (by Daata Editions), Miami USA; Little Hell Gate group show by Daata Editions at Frieze Art Fair, New York, USA; Dream Catcher group show by Daata x Phillips at The Box @ Phillips, New York, USA ; An area of some importance at Digitalartistresidency.org; Textile Memory (AIR Wro residency) at Tętno, Wroclaw, PL; The Tension of Things Unsaid at Listastofan, Reykjavik, IC; Christmas at my parents’ house at Roundabout LX, Lisbon, PT; Now no longer – Now not yet at Spazju Kreattiv, MT.
