Passage

Teresa Busuttil's Passage is a moving image work that considers passages of time and water. Through this work, the artist reflects on her late father’s life spent across and connected to the ocean. Born on the small Mediterranean island of Malta, he migrated to South Australia by boat, living his adult life as a diver and fisherman. Passage is a compilation of footage captured in Malta and Backstairs Passage (a narrow strait between Kangaroo Island and mainland South Australia) bought together with archival footage sourced from Magna Żmien – a grassroots archive project advocating for the digitisation and preservation of Maltese home audio-visual collections. The work explores intergenerational memory and cyclical time with the repetition of ocean tides presented as a constant underpinning force.

Passage was commissioned by fine print Fine Print Magazine for pause ~ play, presented for SALA Festival, 2022

About the Artist
Teresa Busuttil is an Australian artist of Maltese heritage. Her practice blends personal stories, family history and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art that includes sculpture, installation and moving images. She draws from kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography to explore dualities and contradictions present in personal and political history, emotional and cultural inheritance, time and memory. In 2024 Busuttil was selected for the inaugural Malta Biennale of Art and was a studio program artist at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental in 2023 with recent exhibitions at Firstdraft, Sydney NSW; and ACE, Adelaide SA.