‘Killing Time’ artist couple bring playful surrealism to Casemates

Gibraltarian artist Asta Azopardi and Ecuadorian artist Nour Khamis are holding a joint exhibition ‘Killing Time’ this week at the Fine Arts Gallery in Casemates.

The artists, who are also a couple, are each exhibiting for the first time having recently completed their Masters in the Royal College of Art in London, where they met.

Ms Azopardi is showing her works which include a vibrant display of character design and animation. The exhibition brings together finished works, animation sequences and behind-the-scenes material, including sketchbooks that document her creative process.

The style of her work she said centres on everyday moments transformed into exaggerated, playful scenes. Ordinary activities, such as a morning coffee, are reimagined through with the use of bold colour and dynamic movement.

“I like to do quite mundane things, and I will take maybe having a coffee in the morning, and then I'll make a crazy, wacky version of it. I like to take the most boring everyday they do and try to make it crazy by like making maybe the limbs exaggerated. I really like playing with scale and colours,” she said.

Her sketchbooks feature comic-style sequences, collage and pen work, reflecting the research and experimentation she developed during her MA at the Royal College of Art.

“I've been exploring character design and trying to become more expressive within my cartoonish designs,” she said.

A key element of the exhibition is an animation video that combines her final MA film with supporting production material. Visitors can see both the completed piece and the individual frames and sketches that fed into it. The film, which took around six months from initial concept to finished drawings, has already been shown at festivals in London and Bulgaria.

She acknowledged that when she first decided she would exhibit here on the Rock she was concerned that people wouldn't understand her style, “because it's very different from what I see exhibited here [in the Fine Arts Gallery].”

“But I thought I come from here, so I should try to show everyone that it's not just fine art stuff that you can do. You can push the envelope, and you can do things that people may deem childish, but you should still have fun and just like show everyone what you can do,” she added.

Ms Azopardi plans to move back to Gibraltar in September and intends to continue developing new animated films while further touring her existing work on the international festival circuit.

Ms Khamis is showing an exhibition of paintings and animation that she describes as “surreal”, “meditative” and “a bit strange, but a little bit magical at the same time”.

The collection centres on still, surrealist compositions that invite slow looking and reflection, she said.

A highlight of the exhibition is a piece she refers to as her “big bunny”, titled “Running Late”. She said that she “spent the most time on” this painting using it as a moment to “reflect on everything that I did the past year”.

Having previously focused on animation, where she said there is a lot of movement, different scenes, a lot of thinking about a wider story she set herself the challenge of telling a story in a single image. She added that “Running Late” becoming the catalyst for the rest of the smaller works in the exhibition.

Some of her works on the walls are originals, while others are available as prints.

Originally, the exhibition was conceived as part of a larger collective project involving their studio group, Roadmap Studio, which includes nine artists. However, visa issues affecting several of the international members meant the group show could not proceed as planned.

Despite the setback, the couple decided to go ahead as a duo, encouraged by the warm reception from Gibraltar, said Ms Khamis.

She also praised the Rock’s “tight-knit community” and the backing received from the Fine Arts Gallery, noting “the gallery has supported us so much in this, and really encouraged us to come”.
Their decision to proceed was shaped by that enthusiasm. “We said, ‘Okay, we have to do it.”

The exhibition Killing Time runs at the Fine Arts Gallery in Casemates until Monday, July 13, from 9.30am to 3.30am.