(produced in collaboration with Alex Attard)
Date of the work: 2023
Medium: Digital photography on three LCD screens
Exhibition history: Prestorjha (2023)
As work on the Prestorjha series developed, the Ninfa figure took on an iconic quality for the solo exhibition on the theme of reimagining prehistoric female figures from a feminist perspective. Tabone’s take on feminism comes across as non-confrontational and somewhat inclusive of multiple possibilities. This is most likely why she opened her work in this series for a collaboration with Alex Attard, a Maltese art photographer whose work she has admired for several years.
As Attard has also been observing Tabone’s work closely for a long time, he immediately accepted her invitation to collaborate. In the process, what they have developed together has been given the name Storjha. By extension of the fact that prestorjha is the proposed Maltese spelling for the feminist term preherstory, storjha is the lexical equivalent for herstory in the artists’ mother tongue.
The collaboration between Attard and Tabone started in 2022, as she prepared for her Trasparenza retrospective exhibition. At first, they explored alternative ways to look at Tabone’s transparent plexiglass objects. This was done through Attard individual vision that shows overlooked elements in objects that range from contemporary architecture to archival artefacts. As Tabone continued to create works for the Prestorjha series, she invited Attard to photograph Speculum outside a gallery environment.
A curatorial decision to present this work as a triptych of digital images displayed on LCD panels is also worth noting. This makes them more dynamic than conventional art photos printed on photographic paper, plexiglass, or some other flat surface, rendering them into physical objects. In this way, the digital images are as ephemeral a time-based installation as the inflatable object depicted within them.
