Visitors are effectively empowered to dialogue with the many inquisitive stimuli imparted by the contemporary artworks within a broader historical and cultural context. National borders are simply done without since the cornucopia of issues tackled by the 130+ participating artists open up a window on the entire global scene.
Mario Cutajar President, Malta Biennale 2026 and Chairman, Heritage Malta
11 March - 29 May
Valletta Birgu Victoria Xagħra
maltabiennale.art
President
MARIO CUTAJAR
MB26 Executive Board
Noel Zammit, Kenneth Gambin, Albert Marshall, Annabelle Stivala, Russell Muscat, Sarah-Lee Zammit, Toni Attard
General Coordination
Michelle Delceppo
Artistic Director
ROSA MARTÍNEZ
Curatorial Team
Alexia Medici, Antoine Borg Micallef
Designers
Gonzalo Pastor, Jesús de los Ojos
Executive Coordinator
MELANIE ERIXON
Coordination and Logistics team
Kevin Abela, Pierre Bonello, Oliver Spiteri, David Gatt, Chris Galea, Jean-Paul Barthet, Leanne Axiak, Marco Camilleri, Ryan Vella, Adam Xerri, Albert Cassar, Antoine D’Amato, Christine Cremona, Christopher Spiteri, David Parascandolo, Dylan Cachia, Ivan Barbara, James Mercieca, Jason Pace, John Mary Camenzuli, John Xuereb, Maria Cremona, Maria Galea, Maria Trapani, Mario Coleiro, Marisa Caruana, Mark Parretti, Marl Duca, Maya Galea
Communications Director
LISA GWEN CHETCUTI
Communications and Marketing Team
REVO (Nathan Abela and Rebecca Tanti), Melvic Zammit, Amy Briffa, Daniela Attard Bezzina, Fiona Vella, Cursty Vassallo, Isaac Delmar, Keith Camilleri, Mario Camilleri, Nicole Cutajar, Rayant Coleiro, James Licari, Stefania Zuccharello
Scientific Advisors
Sharon Sultana, Kenneth Cassar, Anna Maria Gatt, Daphne Sant Caruana, Emmanuel Magro Conti, Franceen Galea, Gianluca Falzon, Ivan Cocker, Matthew Balzan, Nicoline Sagona, Ninette Sammut, Raymond Howard, Robert Cassar
Events Management and Coordination
VANESSA CIANTAR
Production team
Althea Axisa, Christian Formosa, Iona Caruana, Juanita Vassallo, Marcia Grima, Nicolai Formosa, Rebecca Xerri, Renato Fenech
Publications
GODWIN VELLA
Cherise Micallef, George Agius, Kevin Saliba, Maria Muscat, Pierre Balzia
Administration and Finance
Rachel Caruana, Lawrence Spiteri, Sue Ellen Farrugia Gregory, Mark Anthony Spiteri, Christian Sammut, Clare Fenech, Edward Micallef, Isabella Micallef, Josette Ellul, Jurgen Castillo, Lara Seychell, Lorraine Zammit Tabone, Louise Taliana, Luana Caruana, Martin Micallef, Rydon Cassar, Samantha Debono
Foreword
Mario Cutajar
President, Malta Biennale 2026 and Chairman, Heritage Malta
Art is the ultimate search for beauty. Like other commonly used terms, ‘beauty’ can have varying connotations. Many equate beauty with aesthetics and pleasure, relevant qualities which, nonetheless, lack the depth of the original gist. In antiquity and in the renaissance, the core attribute of beauty was harmony, which by its very essence relies on the seamless integration of multiple parts.
It does not take much to reach the conclusion that this noble understanding is in sharp contrast with the current state of affairs, locally, and internationally. Ecological depletion, discord, and confrontation have become the order of the day. Society is increasingly gripped by restlessness and diffidence. The situation is so dire at times that the point of no return looks dangerously near.
Yet hope is the last thing to die. Should each one of us do his/her bit, harmony can be awarded a new lease of life. This creed is aptly epitomized by this edition’s motto CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT – an unequivocal call to stop, think, and act. Select Heritage Malta’s museums and sites will double up as prominent laboratories of thought, discernment, and motivation for a few months.
Visitors are effectively empowered to dialogue with the many inquisitive stimuli imparted by the contemporary artworks within a broader historical and cultural context. National borders are simply done without since the cornucopia of issues tackled by the 130+ participating artists open up a window on the entire global scene.
This is the base ingredient for the exceptionality of the Malta Biennale. Past, present, and future are infused in one holistic and harmonious experience that engages the viewer on the emotional and spiritual level. In many ways, this aligns with our vision for the museums and sites in our care. The outstanding cultural patrimony endowing our minute archipelago constitutes an unparalleled opportunity to craft a genuinely harmonious future – purified, restructured, reinvigorated.
Curatorial Statement
Rosa Martínez
Artistic
Director & Head Curator
Malta Biennale 2026
We are living through times in which political and aesthetic ideals become increasingly threatened by the proliferation of new forms of global enslavement. Wealth remains concentrated, natural resources are exploited without restraint, and the power to decide who lives and who dies is held by a few. Historical forms of oppression unfold today under new, complex shapes that conceal the roots and the mechanisms of domination. The expansion of information technologies has not fulfilled its promise of democratising knowledge; instead, their ruthless instrumentalisation at the hands of the dominant powers keeps producing a toxic flood of misinformation that results in new forms of alienation.
Contemporary art is not immune to these phenomena. It too can become trapped in repetition, seduced by spectacle, and shaped by the same logic of excess that dominates other fields of cultural consumption. A repetitive mannerism permeates artistic practices, while the expansion of the Western canon fails to conceal the inequalities in the production, access, and enjoyment of art. It is precisely in this context that any Biennale must ask itself what an art exhibition can do: to avoid adding more noise, and instead to create spaces for discernment, responsibility, and transformation.
CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT, the title of the Malta Biennale 2026, uses three verbs to articulate an urgent call to action with the will to engage with and respond to the current state of things. To CLEAN is an invitation to stop environmental, ethical, and aesthetic pollution; to purge, digest, and expel what is destructive and what is false. To CLEAR is a call to discern and decipher; to elucidate and understand, and to recover attention as a political and poetic act. To CUT proposes to break away; to radically shift direction and open new paths, beyond resignation and the comfort of superficial narratives.
The Maltese archipelago is marked by the porous but strong quality of limestone, and by the centuries-long process of extracting and transforming this material into defensive structures, churches, noble palaces or humble homes. The Malta Biennale unfolds across an archipelago with a dense and fascinating history. Malta’s sites are not neutral spaces. The Maltese context is replete with prehistoric structures, fortifications and palaces of the Knights of St John; rooms where the Catholic Inquisitors administered crime and punishment; defensive structures like the Ċittadella in Gozo; museums of archaeology, maritime history or ethnographic art; as well as natural environments not yet devoured by mass tourism and urban speculation. These
historical landscapes carry narratives of extraction, devotion, power struggles, repression, insurrection, labour, fear, blood and survival. And also beauty.
Site specificity is the foundation of the curatorial and artistic processes that are presented in the international exhibition. Artworks do not simply occupy a pre-existing space, but rather produce space as they establish new dialogues through the narratives that each one of them conveys. In this expanded constellation of venues, visitors are invited to move, pause, and recalibrate. To think and feel things over, to think and feel them better.
The Malta Biennale 2026 asks how contemporary art can enhance critical awareness of our past and present, while still fostering the experience and enjoyment of different forms of understanding beauty. It proposes encounters that are transgenerational, transdisciplinary, and transcultural, not as a spectacle of diversity, but as a necessary space for critical connection, shared responsibility, and a critical awareness to act in the realities we live in.
Fort St Elmo & the National War Museum
St George’s Square
Republic Street
National Museum of Archaeology
Merchants St Grand Master’s Palace
St John’s Co-Cathedral
MelitaSt
Tritons’ Fountain
MUŻA - The National Community Art Museum
Parliament Building QuarryWharf
Upper Barrakka
National Pavilion
Auberge D’Italie Merchants Street, Valletta
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 10.00-18.00hrs
Last entry: 17.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Maltese Pavilion
Wonderland: Kaos Kontemporanju
Curator
Katya Micallef
Artists
Ġulja Holland, Pierre Portelli, Roderick Camilleri, Victor Agius, Vince Briffa
Drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Malta Pavilion invites visitors down the rabbit hole to question the illusion of perfection shaped by advanced technology, globalisation, and industrialisation –forces that, rather than bringing order, conjure a curious kind of chaos in contemporary life. Conceived as an immersive and thoughtprovoking journey, the pavilion unfolds as a space of wonder and disquiet, where familiar narratives of progress are gently unsettled. Through art, material, and idea, it reflects Malta’s position at the crossroads of cultures while encouraging visitors to pause, reflect, and reimagine the fragile balance between innovation, humanity, and the natural world.
International Exhibition
Artist
Amanda Holiday
b. 1964, Sierra Leone
Title
1. The Return, 2023
2. The Return II, 2023
3. Mummy Whirl, 2024
4. The Rise, 2025
5. Dreamery, 2025
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Amanda Holiday studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and exhibited in landmark black art shows in the 1980s. Between 2001 and 2010 she lived in Cape Town. In 2024 she received the Peut Guard artist award. In 2025 her 1987 drawing Red Riding Hood was shown in Women in Revolt! touring from Tate Britain to Whitworth, Manchester, and she undertook a UKRI Travel fellowship to the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC, Washington. She is represented by Felix and Spear gallery in London.
Artist
Guerrilla Girls
est. 1985, United States
Title Laugh, Cry, Fight, 2026
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous artist activists who use bold visuals, disruptive headlines, and statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics, and popular culture. Working from an intersectional feminist position, they challenge dominant narratives by revealing exclusion and inequality. Since 1985, they have produced hundreds of projects worldwide, including posters, banners, books, videos, museum interventions, and exhibitions. In 2025–26, the Getty Research Institute’s How to Be a Guerrilla Girl marked their 40th anniversary with a major retrospective and new commission.
Artist Sandra Zaffarese
b. 1976, Malta
Title
The Woman’s Bible
(A field guide to the absence), 2026
Sandra Zaffarese is a Maltese-English artist based in Malta. Trained as a sculptor, she holds a degree in sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts, London. Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in research and often begins with a story or a book, frequently overlooked, or forgotten texts, which are shared, reproduced, and reactivated. Rooted in sculpture but unbound by medium, her work navigates material, context, and intuition, exploring how narratives endure and circulate.
Artist
Therese Debono
b. 1977, Malta
Title In Place. Where the Land Holds, 2025-2026
Therese Debono is a Maltese photographer whose practice develops through long-term engagement with specific places. She is concerned with what cannot be seen: traces, erasure, and the quiet presence of what has taken place. Her work focuses on sites that have been altered, erased, or rebuilt, and are now becoming ordinary while still holding layers of lived experience and, at times, trauma. Rather than explain or reconstruct events, her photographs allow absence to remain visible. Her practice is shaped by repetition, restraint, and time. Alongside her artistic work, she lectures on photography and visual culture.
International Exhibition
Auberge de Provence, Republic Street, Valletta
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-19.00hrs
Last entry: 18.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Ana ÁlvarezErrecalde
b. 1973, Argentina
Title
1. Birth of my Daughter, 2005
2. Umbilical Self-portrait, 2013
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title
Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Ana Álvarez-Errecalde is an artist, migrant, and mother whose work reflects her lived experiences. She explores the complexities of motherhood, addressing gestation, caregiving, and themes such as illness, disability, and death as intrinsic to life. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and Latin America, including Caixaforum (Spain), the Royal College of Art (UK), and the Museum of Latin American Art (Argentina). She is the author of two photographic books and currently works at Can Fugarolas, a community initiative, while volunteering with people in their final stages of life.
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Artist Daniel Cilia
b. 1963, Malta
Title Calendars in stone –
c.5,000 BC, 1992-2025
Artist João Marques
b. 2001, Portugal
Title Neste país sem olhos
e sem boca, 2024-2025
Artist Melita Couta
b. 1974, Cyprus
Title Kappakli, 2022
Daniel Cilia has pursued photography since the age of thirteen. Self-taught, he maintains that photography is shaped not by equipment but by light, which defines form and perception. His first major exhibition was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, in 1986. He lectured photography at the College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Oslo (1989), and headed the photography department at the Art Institute of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici (199095). Cilia specialises in editorial photographic design, with more than 160 photographic books on the Maltese Islands to his credit.
João Marques is a Portuguese emerging visual artist born in 2001 in Coimbra. He lives and works between Lisbon and Leiria. His recent artistic research focuses on ideas of earth and matter within drawing and installation.
Melita Couta is a visual artist working across sculpture, installation, performance, and siteresponsive practices. Her work explores memory, material, and landscape through long-term research and material engagement. She creates hollow ceramic vessels described as “fossils in reverse” and has exhibited internationally across Europe and the Mediterranean.
International Exhibition
St George’s Square,Valletta
Artist Austin Camilleri
b. 1972, Malta
Title Lumen, 2025
Artist Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 10.00-18.00hrs
Last entry: 17.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Austin Camilleri is a visual artist whose practice spans installation, painting, drawing, sculpture, architectural interventions, and video. His work reflects an inquiry into the human condition and its relationship with the non-human, rooted in notions of transience and polarity. These concerns inform a spiritual discernment, political scrutiny, and environmental sensitivity across his practice. Camilleri’s work has been exhibited extensively in biennales, as well as solo and group exhibitions in museums, private galleries, and public spaces across Europe, America, and Asia.
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Artist Emily Jacir
b. 1976, Mediterranean
Title Il-Kelb tad-Dar, 1994-2026
1. Il-Kelb tad-dar, a performance gift 2026
2. Il-Kelb tad-dar, Palestine National Dog stamps, 1994
3. Il-Kelb tad-dar, video, 2026
4. Il-Kelb tad-dar, stone sculpture, 2026
5. Il-Kelb tad-dar, tapestries, 2026
6. Il-Kelb tad-dar, stone carving installation, 2026
Artist
Halil Altındere
b. 1971, Turkey
Title
1. Star Wars: Knights of Malta vs Ottoman Drones, 2026
2. Star Wars: Royal Hunt, 2023
Emily Jacir’s interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, installation, performance, sound, and text. Her work explores personal and collective movement through time and public space, examining trans-Mediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through historical and archival research, her work is rooted in gathering, community, and social affiliations. She has received international recognition including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), the Hugo Boss Prize (2008), the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship (2015), and prizes in 2023 from NCAD, Dublin, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Halil Altındere (b. 1971) produces work in various mediums and collaborates with ballet dancers, opera singers, hip hop artists, guides, police officers, and architects. His practice inquires political, social and cultural codes, addressing resistance against oppressive systems. He works with people with first-hand experience, positioning himself as a mediator. His recent works focus on fantastically absurd situations encountered in daily life, confronting audiences with realities that appear imaginary.
Artist Lara Nickel
b. 1985, United States
Title 12 Horses – Homage to Jannis Kounellis, 2018
Artist
Maurizio Cattelan
b. 1960, Italy
Title
Untitled, 2018
Artist Mohamed Ibrahim Elmasry
b. 1978, Egypt
Title
The Economy of Power Pays the Price, 2018-ongoing
Lara Nickel is an installation-based painter and published author. She is known for 12 Horses –Homage to Jannis Kounellis, first exhibited in 2019 at Museum Fondazione 107, Turin. In 2022, Skira published a trilingual book on her work. She is currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches drawing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian conceptual artist renowned for his irreverent, subversive practice that employs satire, provocation, and appropriation to critique art, power, and society. Drawing from real people and objects, his works challenge institutions through playful yet unsettling gestures. Key works include La Nona Ora (1999), L.O.V.E. (2010), and America (2016), a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim Museum. His work has been exhibited internationally in major museums, biennials, and public spaces.
Mohamed Elmasry is a visual artist whose practice is grounded in long-term research, experimentation, and critical analysis. His work transforms information, symbols, and everyday observations into visual structures that interrogate dominant narratives of history, politics, and geography. Working between Cairo, Beirut, and Dubai, he employs industrial and systematic production methods to develop works with sustained conceptual and material impact. His practice operates at the intersection of academic research and lived experience, using art as an analytical framework rather than representation.
Artist Priscilla Monge
b. 1968, Costa Rica
Title
The Weight Of Blood. A Contemporary Ritual, 2026
Artist
Raphael Vella
b. 1967, Malta
Title
The Sitting is Open, 2024-2026
Artist
Sachiko Abe
b. 1975, Japan
Title
Cut Papers #24, 2026
Artist
Tau Luna
b. 1989, Colombia
Title
Before we were human, 2023-2026
Priscilla Monge is a conceptual artist born in 1968 in San José, Costa Rica. Active internationally since the early 1990s, she has participated in major biennials, including Venice and São Paulo, and exhibited at institutions such as Museo Reina Sofía and MoMA PS1. Her work explores violence, femininity, power, and vulnerability.
Raphael Vella is a Maltese artist working with drawing, animation, and installation. His practice addresses politics, identity, and society. He has exhibited internationally, published widely, and cocurated the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He has been selected as one of the artists for the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2026.
Sachiko Abe is a Japanese artist whose practice spans performance, drawing, film, and installation. Since 1995 she has cut paper daily, initiating the performance project Cut Papers in 2003. Her work explores time, discipline, and embodied concentration and has been presented in 23 cities across 11 countries.
Tau Luna is an artist and researcher whose practice develops through artistic research, mediation, and pedagogy. Their work examines the effects of coloniality on territories and bodies in the Global South, human migration as one of its consequences, and shared memory with more-than-human migrant beings through intersections of ancestral, scientific, and intuitive technologies. They have contributed to research on cultural policies and funding, publishing the Guide to Careful Funding (PAAC, Barcelona) and the Lumbre guide for migrants. Between 2022 and 2024, they co-directed La creatura re[d]productora feminista in Barcelona and promoted the Urdimbre transfeminist educational programme.
Artist
Vasco Araújo
b. 1975, Portugal
Title Carne Vale, 2026
Vasco Araújo (b. 1975, Lisbon), completed a degree in sculpture at FBAUL in 1999 and attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Maumaus. In 2003 he received the EDP Prize for New Artists, Portugal. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally.
National/Thematic Pavilions
Fort St Elmo and the National War Museum
Mediterranean Street, Valletta
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-19.00hrs
Last entry: 18.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Chinese Pavilion
The Realm of Clarity: Ecological Foresight and Civilisational Exchange in Oriental Wisdom
Curator
Ying Jinfei
Artists
Cao Ou
Chen Jian
Chen Qi
Dong Minjie
Fang Limin
Ji Renping
Li Hongbo
Liang Quan
Wang Chao
Wang Xiao
Xu Chentao
Ying Jinfei
Zhang Dazhen
Embassy
People’s Republic of China
The Realm of Clarity explores the philosophical depth of Eastern water culture within the Malta Biennale 2026 theme “Clean Clear Cut.” The exhibition unfolds in two parts: “Clarifying All Rivers” highlights water’s diversity and inclusiveness as a metaphor for civilisational exchange, while “Nourishing All Beings” presents water’s ecological wisdom as guidance for sustainable development. Together, they chart a path from understanding to practice, expressing a vision in which humanity and nature coexist harmoniously. The pavilion offers a contemporary interpretation of Chinese ecological thought, contributing water-like clarity, resilience, and openness to global dialogue.
Armenian Pavilion
The Sound of What Was Never Seen
Curator
Sona Hovhannisyan
Artist Raffi Yedalian
Embassy
Republic of Armenia
The Sound of What Was Never Seen invites visitors into a meditative Armenian landscape shaped by silence, memory, and the elusive rhythm of an unseen water drop. Through Raffi Yedalian’s works, fragments hint at imagined wholeness, and absence becomes a form of presence. The pavilion reflects Armenia’s histories of resilience and imposed quiet, offering a space where fragility becomes endurance and silence becomes testimony. In dialogue with Malta’s own relationship to water, the exhibition asks visitors to listen differently – to sense how what is hidden, hushed, or never seen can still resonate with profound clarity.
Finnish Pavilion
Bastion of Refugia
Artist Anna Pesonen
Embassy
Republic of Finland
The Finnish Pavilion presents Bastion of Refugia, an exploration of how we rebuild presence in an age of engineered disconnection. Anna Pesonen’s Post Futurism transforms Malta’s architectures of surveillance into instruments of resonance, linking Karelian kelkettely, Maltese għana, and ancient acoustic sites such as Ħaġar Qim and the Hypogeum. A monumental sound mirror at Fort St Elmo broadcasts endangered vocal traditions, inverting colonial technologies into communal infrastructures. Drawing on millennia-old systems of listening and alignment, the pavilion proposes rupture as possibility and sound as a technology for sustaining collective life.
French Pavilion
Facing the Challenge
Curator
Dominique Moulon
Artist
Louis-Paul Caron
Embassy
Republic of France
Facing the Challenge brings together the twin urgencies of climate change and artificial intelligence. French artist Louis-Paul Caron presents Incendies, a series of AI-generated fire sequences where serene interior scenes contrast with burning landscapes beyond the window. The works echo Jacques Chirac’s warning that “our house is burning”, urging viewers to confront environmental responsibility rather than look away. By using generative technologies while questioning their impact, the exhibition highlights AI as both a contributor to and a tool for addressing global crises. It invites visitors to reflect, understand, and act within their own capacities.
Polish Pavilion
Archive of Hesitations
Curator
Ada Piekarska
Artist
Weronika Zalewska
Embassy Republic of Poland
Archive of Hesitations is a two-channel installation by Weronika Zalewska that contrasts rigid, hierarchical models of knowledge with embodied, affective ways of understanding. One channel adopts the language of a game show to expose the desire for clear criteria and instant judgement. The other assembles poetic, non-linear fragments from the Educational Film Studio archive, resisting coherence and standardisation. Mila Nowacka’s visual intervention, built from delicate feedback loops, reveals the image’s material instability. Together, these elements create tension between formatted knowledge and lived experience, proposing uncertainty as a generative space where questions matter more than definitive answers.
Serbian Pavilion
Where to Escape? In Search of Oneself
Curator
Stevan Martinović
Artists
Milorad Panić
Miloš Šarić
Sonja Žugić
Embassy Republic of Serbia
Where to Escape? In Search of Oneself brings together artists who explore solitude, memory, and the search for meaning through recycled materials and symbolic forms. Their sculptures and images reflect on family, tradition, and contemporary loneliness, revealing how personal and collective histories shape our sense of self. By transforming familiar objects and natural elements into poetic structures, the pavilion invites visitors to contemplate time, transcendence, and the fragile balance between past and future. It becomes a space for introspection, where fragments of memory open pathways toward renewal.
Spanish Pavilion Vessels of Silence.
The Journey and Memory in the Mediterranean
Curator
Elvira Cámara
Artist
Concha García
Embassy
The Kingdom of Spain
Thematic Pavilion
Umanissima
Sopravvivenza
Curators
studioamatoriale
(Angelo Castucci, Francesco Tola)
Artist Sergio Racanati
Thematic Pavilion
Last Ice Stand
Curator
Antar Works
Artist Antar Dayal
The project is part of the continuity of the Mediterranean ceramic tradition, establishing a dialogue between the memory of a craft and forms derived from the medieval Christian imagination. The artist recovers plaster moulds found in a pottery workshop and incorporates them into her creation, establishing a link between tradition and contemporary art. Each piece articulates a journey through space and time, in which different concepts such as craftsmanship, spirituality, vestiges and traves subtly emerge. These works function as starting points for a metaphorical journey across the Mediterranean, evoking the connections that have united its peoples throughout history.
The light of awareness serves as a guide toward collective renewal. The walls of a casemate at Fort St Elmo are flooded with light and clad to hold the void of the Gozo quarries. Although the emptiness of the quarries is the result of an extractive process with no inherent connection to spirituality, it is precisely here that a space for reflection and collective introspection is created. Here, faith is not understood as religiosity, but as an inspiring force for desired change, a reclaiming of the future, an ecosophy of coexistence – an Umanissima Sopravvivenza.
Last Ice Stand reinterprets the Malta Biennale theme through the language of glacial memory. Clean popsicles appear colourless and minimal, evoking the purity of recent ice. Clear forms reveal mid-depth layers, transparent and softly turquoise, suggesting emotional immediacy. Cut pieces represent ancient ice – deep blue, fractured, and fading – each a slice of disappearing time. Mobile and quietly disruptive, the installation inserts itself into public space with a familiar yet unsettling form. Through wit and precision, Last Ice Stand transforms nostalgia into climate awareness, inviting viewers into a subtle but urgent conversation about a warming world.
Thematic Pavilion
Okuzingiramu
Curator
Nyanzi Wamala
Artists
Namata Birungi
Tereza Maria
Joshua Mulungi
Yiga
Thematic Pavilion
Qatgħa
Curator
Aditya Singh
Bhadoria
Artist
Aditya Singh
Bhadoria
At St Elmo’s colonial post, the artist presents Okuzingiramu – Luganda for entanglement – as a living metaphor for the nurturing, complicated ties that sustain bodies, ecosystems, and communities. Drawing on hybrid identities and the friction of living between worlds, she works with mycelial thinking and fragile materials such as raffia, cardboard, and voile. Suspended fluid tapestries form organic webs that evoke interdependence and feminist principles of collective care. These architectures reject isolation and productivity as measures of worth, proposing instead that identity is multiple, autonomy relational, and thriving only possible through shared, entangled support.
Qatgħa is a site-adaptive architectural pavilion that explores the act of cutting as a spatial, material, and ethical operation. Rather than functioning as a static object, the pavilion unfolds as a sequence, guiding visitors through moments of compression, openness, and pause. Constructed using reclaimed timber and recycled wood composites, the structure employs dryjointed and modular assembly techniques that allow for disassembly, reuse, and minimal material waste. Cutting is articulated not as destruction, but as precision – where what is removed, simplified, or left open becomes as significant as what is constructed. Drawing from vernacular intelligence and contemporary ecological concerns, QATGĦA positions restraint as a design value, proposing architecture as an act of clarity and responsibility.
Thematic Pavilion
Sea Pavilion: Nothing
Precious, Precious Nothing
Curators
Azad Asifovich
Vlad Sludskiy
Artists
Aziza Shaden
Luca Resta
Thematic Pavilion
Take the Sky Out of Your Belly
Curator
Hara Shin
Artists
Hara Shin
The Sea Pavilion invites visitors into a shifting ecology of value, where objects drift between treasure and trash, ownership and abandonment. Spread across Malta’s coasts, heritage sites, and underwater zones, the pavilion treats the sea as both stage and metaphor for circulation, loss, and rediscovery. Working with artists and local partners, it transforms discarded materials into works that question how worth is assigned, stolen, or dissolved. By dispersing artworks and inverting visibility – sometimes submerging pieces entirely – the pavilion mirrors the fluidity of maritime space, revealing value as something always in motion, never fixed, and continually renegotiated.
Take the Sky Out of Your Belly reimagines Malta’s skies, seas, fortresses, and temples as a living ecology of breath, vibration, and cyclical transformation. The pavilion dissolves boundaries between human and non-human rhythms, drawing climate data, spores, bodies, and architectures into continuous circulation. Four interwoven works – Breathing Circles, The Shattered Greenhouse, Omnipresent Cyclops, and The Protruding Community – activate Malta’s historical sites as porous, resonant platforms rather than static monuments. Through these shifting flows, the pavilion becomes a metabolising organism where memory, climate, and collective presence cocreate new possibilities for coexistence.
Exhibition
Artist Santiago Sierra b. 1966, Spain
Title The flies, 2026
Artist Wilfredo Prieto b. 1978, Cuba
Title Democracy is discussed on the golf course, 2025
Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid, Spain), after graduating in fine arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, completed his artistic training in Hamburg. His work critically examines structures of power underlying labour exploitation, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and migration. Drawing on strategies associated with Minimal, Conceptual, and Performance Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Sierra produces interventions that confront viewers with the social and political realities embedded in contemporary systems of capital and control.
Wilfredo Prieto’s (b. 1978, Havana, Cuba) work is characterised by the juxtaposition of materials, concepts, and forms, proposing poetic actions that reflect contemporary society. His practice foregrounds ideas as the core of his artistic language.
International Exhibition
Triq l-Indipendenza, Floriana
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: all hours
Artist Sandra Zaffarese b. 1978, Malta
Title
The Woman’s Bible
(A field guide to the absence), 2026
Sandra Zaffarese is a Maltese-English artist based in Malta. Trained as a sculptor, she holds a degree in sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts, London. Her multidisciplinary practice is rooted in research and often begins with a story or a book, frequently overlooked, or forgotten texts, which are shared, reproduced, and reactivated. Rooted in sculpture but unbound by medium, her work navigates material, context, and intuition, exploring how narratives endure and circulate.
Fort St Angelo
Xatt il-Forn
Malta Maritime Museum
Nestu Laiviera
Birgu Old Armoury Victory Square
TriqPaċi kuScicluna
Inquisitor’s Palace & the National Museum of Ethnography
Xatt ir-Risq
Triq il-Mina Kbira
TorriTa’SanĠwann
Triql-ArċisqofMikielGonzi
Triq P. Bo a
Thematic Pavilion
Armoury of the Knights of Malta, Triq Il-Kwartier, Birgu
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-17.00hrs
Last entry: 16.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Thematic Pavilion
A Wall That Isn’t One
Artists
Klelia Siska
Arsenios
Zachariadis
Thematic Pavilion
Between Land and Sea
Curators
Badr el Hammami
Katharina Fink
Artists
Badr el Hammami
Driss Aroussi
Jaafar Akil
Katrin Ströbel
Mohammed Laouli
Yasmina Ben Ari
Yassine Balbziou
A Wall That Isn’t One reinterprets Malta’s ħitan tas-sejjieħ as a living meeting place rather than a boundary. Built through a public dry-stone workshop at the Knights’ old armoury, the pavilion grows into a shared structure that offers shade, rest, and space for conversation. Throughout the Biennale, it will host talks, demonstrations, and gatherings that celebrate local stone craft and landscape traditions. By transforming a traditional wall into a site of encounter, the project shows how heritage can remain active and communal, inviting visitors to imagine more generous ways of coming together.
Between Land and Sea offers a contemporary portrait of Morocco at the meeting point of Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Bringing together leading Moroccan artists, it addresses climate change, migration, social equity, technological shifts, and cultural hybridity as lived realities shaping daily life. Through installation, digital media, performance, and socially engaged practices, the pavilion highlights the dialogue between heritage and innovation, where traditional forms and materials are reimagined for the present. Set within Vittoriosa’s historic architecture, the pavilion creates an immersive encounter that links Morocco’s cultural depth with urgent global conversations, inviting reflection on identity, resilience, and transformation.
Thematic Pavilion
Bullets of Flowers
Curator
Eszter Csillag
Artist Maria Kulikovska
Artist Maria Kulykivska, known as Kulikovska (b. 1988, Crimea, Ukraine, ), is a Ukrainian artist and mother navigating life between Kyiv and Europe. Her work confronts the reality of the ongoing war while proposing an alternative to its killings. Drawing on traditional herbal healing learned from her grandmother in Crimea, she transforms inherited knowledge into a tool of survival and artistic practice. In Bullets of Flowers, medicinal herbs are embedded into bullets meant not to kill, but to mend, transforming weapons into instruments of care. Hanging body fragments evoke vulnerability, physical fragmentation, and the enduring value of the female form. In the second room, “the Table of Negotiation?” calls for recognition of lives lost to circumstances not of their choosing.
Thematic Pavilion
Doom Pop
Curator
Expanded Media Lab
Artists
Jeremy Ripley
Tra Bouscaren
Doom Pop is a visceral installation by Tra Bouscaren and Jeremy Ripley, that transforms commercial spectacle into a meditation on mortality. Suspended billboards form a tornado sculpture, encircled by body bags, also made from billboard material – symbols of consumption’s human toll. Giant American flags crafted from accident lawyer ads line the walls, recasting corporate imagery as monuments to disaster. The work critiques the seductive language of pop culture and its entanglement with violence, inviting viewers into a storm of reconfigured media. Doom Pop confronts the business of death, turning familiar slogans into haunting reminders of what society chooses to ignore.
Thematic Pavilion
Dwelling in Fracture
Curator
Minji Kim
Artist
Jiwon Yu
Thematic Pavilion
Floating Fragments
Curator
Rolf Laven
Artists Residents of the Correctional Facility
Dwelling in Fracture presents Yu Jiwon’s sculptural environments built from reconfigured fragments of urban material. His modular structures evoke familiar architecture yet remain unsettled by cuts, voids, and ruptures. Made from humble materials such as cardboard and cement, the works balance solidity with fragility, proposing impermanence as a mode of inhabiting the world. Visitors move through a landscape of remnants that reveal memory, history, and the afterlives of the city. Rather than treating fracture as decay, the pavilion frames it as a site of renewal, inviting reflection on how communities might rebuild through what has been broken.
Floating Fragments is an immersive installation curated by Rolf Laven that brings together artworks and music created by people in prison. Transparent water-filled cubes suspend these fragments in space, evoking both confinement and the persistence of creativity. Visitors move among images, sounds, and reflections that form a constellation of human stories, revealing connection within fragmentation. The project introduces a rare reciprocity: public reflections are carried back into the prison and transformed into new artworks. Set within Malta’s island landscape of passage and enclosure, the pavilion invites contemplation on freedom, belonging, and the shared fragility of human experience.
Thematic Pavilion
Isolation
Curator Ibrahim Shalabi
Artist
Ibrahim Shalabi
Isolation recreates the artist’s experience of medical confinement during the COVID19 pandemic, transforming a personal crisis into an immersive environment. The installation simulates an isolation room whose walls are covered with drug inserts, while a monumental circle of empty medicine boxes marks the relentless cycle of treatment. At its centre, a collapsing sculptural head releases a cascade of pills, embodying exhaustion and dependency. A faint heartbeat fills the space, drawing visitors into an intimate encounter with vulnerability, solitude, and the suspended sense of time. The work reflects on human fragility and the quiet endurance required to survive profound isolation.
Thematic Pavilion
Redefining. PolishGhanaian Textile
Narratives
Curator
Natalia Bradbury
Artists
Eliza Proszczuk
Ernestina
Mansa Doku
Marta Nadolle
Redefining. Polish-Ghanaian Textile Narratives presents a monumental textile installation created through collaboration between Polish and Ghanaian artists. Rooted in the Biennale’s theme, the work revisits a little-known history of solidarity between Poland and Ghana, transforming it into a hopeful vision for future cooperation. Guided by the philosophy of Ubuntu – “I am because we are” – the installation celebrates interdependence, empathy, and shared humanity. Textiles, sound, and site-specific design weave together narratives of cultural exchange, recalling 1960s educational partnerships and Łódź’s textile heritage. The pavilion invites visitors to imagine renewed internationalism grounded in dignity, creativity, and collective care.
Thematic Pavilion
Repertoire in Intermedial Mode
Curators
Caterina Riva
Sara d’Alessandro Manozzo
Artist
Francesco Bertelé
Repertoire in Intermedial Mode presents Francesco Bertelé’s immersive exploration of borders, bodies, and digital perception. Through video, virtual reality, and site-specific actions carried out along Malta’s coastline, the artist investigates how technology and geography shape our understanding of movement and identity. At the pavilion’s centre is #REL1=OFF, a new work created in Malta that transforms a climbing journey into a panoramic video fresco, blending reality and technological hallucination. Together with the VR installation Hic sunt dracones, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on migration, transformation, and the shifting boundaries that define contemporary life.
Thematic Pavilion
So Good to Feel Real
Curator
Francesca Guerisoli
Artists
The Cool Couple (Simone Santilli, Niccolò Benetton)
So Good to Feel Real by The Cool Couple examines how digital cultures turn violence into playful spectacle. The installation, composed by a group of sculptures inspired by video game aesthetics and toy design, are combined with a monologue to present a near-future dystopian scenario in which the boundaries between virtual and real, inside and outside, cognitive processes and computing, have collapsed. Laser beams and mirrors cut through the space, evoking digitised maps and fragmented online narratives. The installation reflects on a world where war becomes consumable content, questioning our growing desensitisation to real suffering.
Thematic Pavilion
Counterpoint Pavilion
Curator
Sofie Renap
Artists
Iris Eysermans
Mahmoud Saleh Mohammadi
Maurizio Chiocchetti
Thematic Pavilion
Troy Pavilion
Curator
Çanakkale Biennial
Initiative
Artists David Blandy
Georgios
Katsagelos
Jakob Gautel
Katrin Korfmann &
Jens Pfeifer
Pınar Yolaçan
Seyhan Boztepe
The Counterpoint Pavilion offers a quiet, site-specific refuge in a world saturated with speed and noise. Formed from layered linen and silk, the pavilion opens gradually into a centre of calm, where a gently swaying plumb bob marks the balance between movement and stillness. The installation invites visitors to slow down, attune their senses, and experience presence as a form of care. The work responds to Malta’s layered landscape with poetic minimalism, offering stillness as a meaningful counterpoint to spectacle.
The Trojan Pavilion, curated by the Çanakkale Biennial Initiative with the Troy Excavation Directorate, brings together artworks that explore the cultural, historical, and symbolic resonance of Troy. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and a cornerstone of Mediterranean imagination, Troy exists between mitos and logos – between epic narrative and archaeological inquiry. The pavilion gathers international artists whose practices question knowledge systems, reimagine ancient worlds, and reflect on contemporary ethical concerns. Conceived as a fictional national pavilion, it treats Troy as a mythohistorical landscape, inviting visitors to consider how legend, memory, and ruins continue to shape shared cultural identity across time.
Thematic Pavilion
Unwashed - Black
Madonnas and White
Lies
Curators
Peng Feng
Lanfranco Aceti
Artist
Lanfranco Aceti
Unwashed traces the suppressed histories of Southern Italian agrarian women – known as schiavone – whose identities were shaped by labour, land, and matriarchal knowledge systems. The project examines how modernisation, hygiene laws, and cultural “whitening” dismantled these traditions, from outlawed artisanal practices to the erasure of rural female economies. Anchored by the figure of the Black Madonna of Montevergine, Unwashed reveals how cleanliness became a tool of control, severing communities from embodied, ecological, and spiritual inheritances. Through sculpture, performance, and archival media, the work reanimates Mediterranean memories marginalised by Western ideals of purity and progress.
International Exhibition
Main Gate Street, Birgu
Artist
Albert Moya
b. 1989, Spain
Title Arca – “Ritual” (Music Video), 2023
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-17.00hrs
Last entry: 16.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Amandine Arcelli
b. 1991, France
Title Loess Doll, 2017
Albert Moya is a Spanish filmmaker whose work spans music videos, documentaries, fashion films, and experimental cinema. His approach blends surreal imagery with strong narrative arcs, influenced by the Dogme 95 movement and directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Carlos Reygadas. Moya has explored the intersection of film, design, and architecture, collaborating with fashion houses including Prada, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Loewe, as well as cultural institutions like the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. He is currently completing his first feature film, continuing his exploration of identity and transformation.
Born in 1991 in Montpellier, France, Amandine Arcelli lives and works in Paris. She is a sculptor whose work explores the relationship between humans and their environment. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including Thirties (Kunsthalle Trier, 2023) and Young International Artists (Lyon Biennale, 2022), and in solo exhibitions such as L’Art dans les chapelles (Locmeltro, 2024). In 2024 she received the ART ECO-CONCEPTION award from Art of Change 21.
Artist
Amélie Giacomini
b. 1988, France Simohammed Fettaka
b. 1981, Morocco
Title
This Is Not an Upside-Down Map, 2026
Amélie Giacomini (b. 1988) lives and works between France and Morocco. Her practice, at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and the moving image, explores the relationship between the body and the environment and is often rooted in collaborative practices and notions of community. Born in Tangier in 1981, Simohammed Fettaka works in Morocco. His multidisciplinary practice explores representation, individuality, animality, and politics, and he founded the Nachia Cinema Festival at the Cinémathèque de Tanger in 2008.
Artist
Catalina Tuca
b. 1977, Chile
Title Luma, 2024
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title
Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Artist
Diyar Shivayi
b. 1995, Iran
Title Phoenix, 2023
Catalina Tuca is a Chilean multidisciplinary visual artist, educator, and independent curator. Her practice addresses geographic identities, collective memories, and systems of collaboration through existing technologies. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Diyar Shivayi is a dancer from Shiraz, Iran. Her work draws on Iranian legends and cultural memory, using movement to evoke cycles of destruction and rebirth. Referencing the myth of the Phoenix, her practice reflects on Iran’s history of endurance and regeneration through fire and ashes. Her work expresses a wish for freedom and is rooted in a land “accustomed to poetry, saturated with patterns and colors”, connecting bodily expression to collective resilience and cultural identity.
Artist
Ioulia Chante
b. 1991, Greece
Title
1. Dogs of War, 2024
2. Venus’s Collapse, 2026
3. The Sorrow, 2024
4. A Divine Intervention, 2026
Artist Joseph Calleja
b. 1981, Malta
Clare Ghigo
b. 1986, Malta
Title
1. em rebmemer
# metric, 2026
2. em rebmemer
# pictured at rest, 2026
Artist
Loredana Longo
b. 1967, Italy
Title The Mantle / Wearing My Loss, 2002-2025
Ioulia Chante is a Greek architect and ceramicist based in Malta and founder of Babau Ceramics. She holds a Master of Architecture from Democritus University of Thrace (2017). Since relocating to Malta in 2018, she has developed a ceramic practice encompassing functional and sculptural works informed by Mediterranean heritage.
Clare Ghigo is a Maltese mezzo-soprano and multidisciplinary artist, and Joseph Calleja is a Maltese visual artist working through collaborative and multidisciplinary practice. Together, they cofounded the audiovisual collective Odekrom. Their collaborative work explores perception, sound, voice, and spatial experience through site-specific installations. Their projects have been presented internationally, including works developed for the Tokyo Biennale, and frequently engage historical architecture, memory, and embodied listening through the intersection of visual art and vocal performance.
Loredana Longo (b. 1967, Catania) lives and works in Milan. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, and performance, addressing themes of power, violence, and transformation. Fire is a recurring element in her work, used as a performative and symbolic gesture.
Artist Mahmoud Massad
b. 1967, Jordan
Title Permits and Hammers, 2026
Artist
Mathias Gramoso
b. 1990, Portugal
Roman Gebhardt
b. 1991, Germany
Title Plágio-4, 2023-2025
Artist
Noor Abed
b. 1988, Palestine
Title A Night We Held Between, 2024
Mahmoud Massad is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist who creates documentaries addressing identity and displacement. His film Recycle (2007) received recognition at Sundance. Works such as Blessed Benefit combine dark comedy with socio-political insight. His recent film Cinema Kawakeb explores personal stories shaped by regional upheaval, reflecting on loss, memory, and resilience. His works have premiered at major international festivals including Cannes, Toronto, and IDFA.
Mathias Gramoso is a French-Portuguese artist living between Berlin and Porto whose multidisciplinary practice explores perception and natural phenomena. Roman Gebhardt is a Berlinbased sound-oriented practitioner working at the intersection of AI, sound, and physical systems. He co-founded the music intelligence company Cyanite.
Noor Abed works at the intersection of performance and film, combining forms of the staged and the documentary. She co-founded the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. She was an assistant curator for documenta fifteen, Kassel (2021-22), and an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2022-24). Her book Stars at Midday was published by Occasional Papers in October 2024, and A Night We Held Between received the e-flux Film Award 2024.
Artist Santiago Sierra b. 1966, Spain
Title Hooded Woman
Seated Facing The Wall, 2023
Santiago Sierra (b. 1966, Madrid, Spain), after graduating in fine arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, completed his artistic training in Hamburg. His work critically examines structures of power underlying labour exploitation, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and migration. Drawing on strategies associated with Minimal, Conceptual, and Performance Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Sierra produces interventions that confront viewers with the social and political realities embedded in contemporary systems of capital and control.
International Exhibition
Xatt l-Assedju l-kbir, Birgu
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-17.00hrs
Last entry: 16.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Artist
Daniel de la Barra
b. 1992, Peru
Title They don’t know the way, 2026
Daniel de la Barra is a Peruvian artist working across painting, video, and installation. His practice explores fiction and political imagination as regenerative forces to dismantle historical power structures and interrogate extractive economic models and colonial legacies. His work examines how spatial representations, materiality, scale, and visual codes operate as mechanisms of power and legitimization. He has exhibited internationally at venues including Delfina Foundation and Frieze (London), Fondazione Sandretto, La Casa Encendida and ARCO (Madrid), Mor Charpentier (Paris), Real Academia de España (Rome), and Museo Central (Lima).
Artist Núria Güell
b. 1981, Spain
Rosa Casado
b. 1971, Spain
Title
Innocent Passage, 2026
Artist Shinji TurnerYamamoto
b. 1965, Japan
Title
Global Tree Project: AXIS MUNDI, 2026
Artist
Women on Waves
est. 1999, Netherlands
Title
1. Do You Need a Safe Abortion?, 2026
2. The Loophole Artist, 2023
3. I Had an Abortion
4. Testimonials
Núria Güell is a visual artist whose practice confronts moral evidence and social conventions. She graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and studied at the Cátedra de Arte de Conducta in Havana, Cuba. Rosa Casado’s practice focuses on performance and critical spatial practices. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Glasgow and has engaged in environmental studies, systems and complexity analysis, and physics. Together, they understand art as a social and political practice, and their work has been widely presented internationally.
Shinji Turner-Yamamoto is a US-based Japanese artist, internationally recognised for the Global Tree Project, a series of site-specific installations using living or fallen trees. His work explores humanity’s interconnection with nature through installations in historical and sacred sites worldwide.
Women on Waves, established in 1999 in the Netherlands, aims to prevent unsafe abortions and empower women to exercise their human rights to physical and mental autonomy. Founded by Dr Rebecca Gomperts, the organisation works to ensure access to medical abortion and accurate information. Its activities include sea voyages, drones, robots, art projects, legal actions, education, and online support, developed in close cooperation with local organisations to address unwanted pregnancy, illegal abortion, and restrictive laws.
International Exhibition
Xatt l-Assedju l-Kbir
1565, Birgu
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-19.00hrs
Last entry: 18.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Anastasia Ax b. 1979, Sweden
Title Settlers (Malta), 2026
The artist’s practice operates at the intersection of body, material, and language. Working with performance, installation, sound, and sculpture, they explore processes of rupture, breakdown, and transformation. Using materials such as paper, concrete, and plaster, the work unfolds through physical actions that activate material in real time. The body functions as a primary tool for listening, shaping, and dismantling, investigating memory, power, and the limits of language.
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Artist
Despina Charitonidi
b. 1991, Greece
Title To Fall with Grace, 2022
Despina Charitonidi is a sculptor based in Athens, Greece. Her work focuses on stripping down primary elements found in urban and underwater construction sites and reforming them through processes of examination and material experimentation. Through these sculptural gestures, her practice reconsiders human environmental interference. Her work has been presented at Malta Biennale (2026), MT, Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto (2025), Theocharakis Foundation (2024), Ars Electronica X Cifra (2023), Microclima Festival – Cinema Galleggiante (2022), and Changwon Sculpture Biennale (2022).
Artist Griet Dobbels
b. 1964, Belgium
Title Mapping the Light, St Angelo, 2026
Griet Dobbels is a Belgian visual artist living and working in Nazareth (B). She began her professional career in 1996 after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work explores landscapes from political, geographical, and archaeological perspectives and is realised through drawings, video installations, sculptures, and happenings.
Artist Pamela Diamante
b. 1985, Italy
Title Estetica dell’Apocalisse, 2017-2024
Pamela Diamante (b. 1985, Bari) served in the Italian Army from 2002 to 2007, leaving with the rank of Corporal Major. She obtained a diploma in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari in 2016. Her multidisciplinary practice, encompassing audiovisual media, photography, sculpture, and installation, explores the relationship between social classes and the structures of political and economic power. Conceived as an open and dynamic process, her work questions viewer participation and critically engages with cultural, anthropological, and communicative mechanisms of knowledge and production.
Artist
Salvatore Arancio
b. 1974, Italy
Title Their Eyes Have No Lids, 2019
Salvatore Arancio is an artist based in London and Nice, working across video, ceramics, sculpture, and installation. His practice investigates the transformative potential of images, exploring intersections of myth, science, nature, and spirituality. Ceramics, moving images, and immersive works function as sites of ambiguity, memory, and perception, reflecting the instability of knowledge and ecological fragility. Arancio has participated in major international biennials including the Venice Biennale, Shenzhen BI-CITY Biennale, and Manif d’Art, Quebec. His work is held in collections including MAXXI Rome, Museo Tamayo Mexico City, and the Galeries Lafayette Foundation.
Artist Victor Sonna
b. 1977, Cameroon
Title Holy Rollers –Time Landscape, 2020-2025
Victor Sonna (b. 1977) is a visual artist whose practice explores identity, malleability, and materiality. Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and raised in the Netherlands, he studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and at AKV | St. Joost. He lives and works between Africa and the Netherlands. His work is informed by his personal history, negotiating between African roots and a European context, and spans paintings, sculptures, and large-scale installations. His work is held in museums and private collections.
International Exhibition
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 09.00-17.00hrs
Last entry: 16.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Artist Georgina Sleap
b. 1987, United Kingdom
Title Conversations in fresh air, 2026
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Georgina Sleap is an artist living in Cairo. She trained at the University of the Arts, London, and Malmö Art Academy. In 2024 her solo exhibition Lis-a-ma hel sitch opened at the Ard Art Institution, Cairo. She has shown work at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. In 2023 she led a multidisciplinary research project funded by the Arts Council England.
Artist Nina Gerada
b. 1983, Malta
Title Me in place and the place in me 2009 – ongoing
1. Portraits of the Rocks, 2025
2. Self-portraits with the rocks, 2025
3. Memory map of Malta, 2009
4. Mother land, 2026
Artist Rocio Berenguer
b. 1987, Spain
Title BADDANCEWITHTHEBADWEEDS, 2025
Nina Gerada is a Maltese artist who works with clay, landscape, and the body to explore embodiment. Born in Malta in 1983, she moved to London where she studied art, design, and architecture. Her career spans film production design, urban design, architecture, and sculpture. After 22 years abroad, she returned to Malta and this homecoming has become a central focus in her work. She has exhibited at the Malta Art Biennale (2024), the Malta Society of Arts (2024 and 2025), the British Ceramics Biennial (2023), and at ‘Collect’ in London (2022 and 2023).
Rocio Berenguer is an author and artistic director. She creates prospective narratives that question imaginaries of the future, primarily focusing on the themes of technology and ecology. Her creations predominantly take the form of dance/theatre shows and interactive installations.
Vjalit-8ta’ Settembru
Triqit-Tiġrija
Ta’ Kola Windmill
Triql-Imqades
TriqJohnOttoBayer
Archaeological Park
International Exhibition
Triq John Otto Bayer, Ix-Xagħra
Opening Hours
Monday to Sunday: 10.00-18.00hrs
Last entry: 17.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Artist
Saskia Calderón
b. 1981, Ecuador
Title
The moons I did not see, 2021
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Saskia Calderón is a visual artist and opera singer. She studied painting at the School of Plastic Arts in Quito in 1997 and holds a degree in plastic arts with a mention in engraving and painting from the Central University of Ecuador (2003). She also trained as a technician in lyrical singing at the National Conservatory of Music in Ecuador (2011). She has participated in over 70 contemporary art exhibitions worldwide with her video performances and sound works.
Artist
Therese Debono
b. 1977, Malta
Title BLANK, 2026
Therese Debono is a Maltese photographer whose practice develops through long-term engagement with specific places. She is concerned with what cannot be seen: traces, erasure, and the quiet presence of what has taken place. Her work focuses on sites that have been altered, erased, or rebuilt, and are now becoming ordinary while still holding layers of lived experience and, at times, trauma. Rather than explain or reconstruct events, her photographs allow absence to remain visible. Her practice is shaped by repetition, restraint, and time. Alongside her artistic work, she lectures on photography and visual culture.
International Exhibition
Il Bambina, Ix-Xagħra
Monday to Sunday: 10.00-18.00hrs
Last entry: 17.30hrs
Closed on Good Friday, 3 April 2026
Artist
Bettina Hutschek b. 1977, Germany
Title Encryption #3 (Sima Bahous on violence against women in the digital space, Nov. 2025), 2026
Bettina Hutschek is a visual artist based in Malta and Berlin. Working with text, drawing, video, installation and performance, she explores the construction and transmission of knowledge, deconstructing ideological narratives through stories, myths and speculative explanations. Her work blurs fiction and “truth” with a poetic and ironic sensibility. She was a Visiting Scholar at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, founded the NGO FRAGMENTA Malta (2013), co-curated the Maltese Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and has worked as a cultural mediator and conference interpreter.
Artist Concetta Modica
b. 1969, Italy
Title Nine Nights of Malta: the journey of a tomato sepal to become a Star, 2025
Concetta Modica was born in Modica and lives in Milan. Her work focuses on the present and its paradoxes, especially the idea of a contemporary epic, conceived through remnants and relationships with matter and sculpture-related media. Her solo exhibitions include Excoperta at GAMeC, Bergamo, and Trilogia di Orlando. Her project La Notte di Sant’Anna won PAC2021. In 2023 she published 28 notti.
Artist Katia Sepúlveda b. 1978, Chile
Title Songwashing, 2018
Katia Sepúlveda is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator born in Santiago de Chile in 1978 and based in Cologne, Germany. Her practice engages with decolonial feminisms, critical theory, and political memory through moving image, archival research, and curatorial practice. She studied photography at the ARCOS Institute and film directing at the University of Chile and later pursued postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). She has participated in major international exhibitions, including the 32nd São Paulo Biennial.
Artist
Tania Berta Judith b. 1988, Spain
Title Katédesmoi in gold: the end of the hero, 2026
Artist
Victor Agius b. 1982, Malta
Title 1. Ħobżna – A Ritual of Elements, 2026
2. Our Bread, 2026
Tania Berta Judith’s practice draws on personal experience and genealogy to reinterpret history and women’s knowledge. She uses embroidery as a politicised technique to reclaim authority for women’s practices, structuring a symbolic world where orality, intuition, and the needle transmit knowledge.
Victor Agius is an artist based in Gozo, Malta, working across sculpture, painting, performance, and installation. Living near the prehistoric Ġgantija Archaeological Park, he explores the island through ritual documentation and the collection of materials from construction excavations. Using the local landscape as his primary medium, his practice addresses humanity’s relationship with the earth through material transformation, ritual, and everyday labour. He trained at the University of Malta, with further studies in Perugia and at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC), Geneva.
Programme
Date: 10th January 2026
Name of Event: Art for Social Justice
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 24th January 2026
Name of Event: Young Voices in Museums
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 21st February 2026
Name of Event: Fake Newssss!
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 28th February 2026
Name of Event: What is Contemporary Art?
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 16th March – 17th April 2026
Name of Event: The Crowd
Venue/location: Fort St Elmo, Valletta Category: Workshop Target Audience: Schoolchildren
Date: 21st March 2026
Name of Event: Juniors’ Discovery Tour of the Malta Pavillion
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Tour
Target Audience: Families
Date: 21st March 2026
Name of Event: Tour of the Malta Pavillion
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Tour
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 24th March 2026
Name of Event: Fake Newssss!
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Youths on the Autism Spectrum
Date: 26th March 2026
Name of Event: Em Rebmemer –How Do We Keep Meaning Alive?
Venue/location: Inquisitor’s Palace, Birgu
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 6th April 2026
Name of Event: The Intentional Frame
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Youths
Date: 7th April 2026
Name of Event: Soundscapes & Paintings
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 8th April 2026
Name of Event: Meditations in Clay
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 8th April 2026
Name of Event: Meditations in Clay Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 9th April 2026
Name of Event: Voices for Freedom Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 10th April 2026
Name of Event: The Social Blanket Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Migrant and Refugee Communities
Date: 11th April 2026
Name of Event: The Social Blanket
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Hearing Impaired
Date: 16th April 2026
Name of Event: “No Other Mother Land” A conversation with Nina Gerada
Location: Church of Saint Catherine of Italy, Valletta
Target Audience: Artists, architects and general public
Date: 17th April 2026
Name of Event: KorMalta Jukebox
Venue/location: Church of Saint Catherine of Italy, Valletta Category: Concert
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 17th April 2026
Name of Event: Biennale Art & Wine
Venue/location: Inquisitor’s Palace, Birgu
Category: Tour
Target Audience: Heritage Malta Members
Date: 20th – 23rd April 2026
Name of Event: Generational Wishes
Venue/location: Fort St Elmo, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Seniors
Date: 30th April
Name of Event: Teaching Through Contemporary Art: Malta Biennale at the Inquisitor’s Palace
Location: The Inquisitor’s Palace, Vittoriosa
Category: Tour
Target Audience: History Educators
Date: 30th April
Name of Event: Teaching Through Contemporary Art: the Malta Biennale at MUŻA
Location: MUŻA, Valletta
Category: Tour
Target Audience: Art Educators
Date: 4th – 7th May 2026
Name of Event: Generational Wishes
Venue/location: Fort St Elmo, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Seniors
Date: 9th May 2026
Name of Event: Primal Gestures
Venue/location: Ġgantija, Xagħra, Gozo Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 11th – 22nd May 2026
Name of Event: What is Contemporary Art?
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Resource Schools
Date: 12th May 2026
Name of Event: Textures
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Visually Impaired
Date: 15th May 2026
Name of Event: A Madrigal Journey
Venue/location: Church of St Catherine of Italy, Valletta Category: Concert
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 16th May 2026
Name of Event: What’s your protest?
Venue/location: MUŻA, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Families
Date: 25th – 29th May 2026
Name of Event: Generational Wishes
Venue/location: Fort St Elmo, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: Seniors
Public Programme
Date: 11th March – 12th April 2026
Name of Event: Woman Grace above the Battle
Venue/location: Pjazza Tritoni, Floriana
Category: Exhibition
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 12th March – 9th April 2026
Name of Event: Entry Denied
Venue/location: Christine X Art Gallery, Sliema
Category: Exhibition
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 12th March – 16th May 2026
Name of Event: Ground 99
Venue/location: Ground 99, Senglea
Category: Video Installation
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 13th March – 25th April 2026
Name of Event: Materia Prima
Venue/location: Jo Borg Gallery, Sliema
Category: Exhibition
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 10th April – 29th May 2026
Name of Event: Nothing is Clear
Venue/location: axis_, Attard
Category: Exhibition
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 1st April 2026
Name of Event: Poetry from the Future
Venue/location: Rumi, Valletta
Category: Open Mic Poetry
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 22nd April 2026
Name of Event: Memorialisation in Public Space
Venue/location: Upper Barrakka Gardens Fountain, Valletta Category: Workshop
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 1st May to 29th May
Name of Event: Sitting on Waste
Venue/location: The Bored Peach Club, Xagħra, Gozo Category: Exhibition
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 5th May 2026
Name of Event: Poetry from the Future
Venue/location: Rumi, Valletta
Category: Open Mic Poetry
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 7th - 8th May 2026
Name of Event: The Last Nation
Venue/location: The Migration Summit Monument, Valletta Category: Interactive Installation
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 9-10th May 2026
Name of Event: Darija Divan
Venue/location: Pjazza tal-Parroċċa ta’ San Pawl, Rabat Category: Dance Solo
Target Audience: General Public
Dates: 9th May
Name of Event: The Last Nation
Venue/location: Victory Square, Birgu Category: Interactive Installation
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 10th May 2026
Name of Event: The Last Nation Venue/location: Independence Square, Victoria, Gozo
Category: Interactive Installation
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 11th May 2026
Name of Event: The Last Nation Venue/location: The Migration Summit Monument, Valletta
Category: Interactive Installation
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 20th May 2026
Name of Event: Sonic Sediments
Venue/location: Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra Archaeological Park, Qrendi
Category: Performance Art
Target Audience: General Public
Date: 28th May 2026, 19:30
Name of Event: Danse Macabre
Venue/location: Upper Barrakka Gardens, Valletta
Category: Participatory Performance Workshop
Target Audience: General Public
Hospitality partners offering 15% discount to Malta
Biennale 2026, combo ticket holders
MUŻA Restaurant
MUŻA Restaurant, Merchants Street, Valletta VLT 1100
Cargo Bar & Dine
Cargo, Triq L-Assedju L-Kbir, Birgu Waterfront
Luciano Restaurant
21, 22 Merchant Street, Valletta. VLT 1173
Bistro 516*
Vault 5, Valletta Waterfront
Browns Kitchen*
Vault 4, Valletta Waterfront
Hard Rock Cafe*
Vault 17, Valletta Waterfront
Hi Sushi*
Vault 2, Valletta Waterfront
Ta’ Detta*
Vault 6, Valletta Waterfront
Tribelli*
Vault 3, Valletta Waterfront
Manon Gastro Bar & Bistro 11, South Street, Valletta
Ferdie’s Restaurant
Triq Sant Antnin, Ghajnsielem, Gozo
* The discount is not applicable on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. The discount is applicable only on food items and excludes beverages.
In Partnership with
In Collaboration with Organising
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TheMalta Biennale unfolds across an archipelago with a dense and fascinating history. Malta’s sites are not neutral spaces. The Maltese context is replete with prehistoric structures, fortifications and palaces of the Knights of St John; rooms where the Catholic Inquisitors administered crime and punishment; defensive structures like the Ċittadella in Gozo; museums of archaeology, maritime history or ethnographic art; as well as natural environments not yet devoured by mass tourism and urban speculation. These historical landscapes carry narratives of extraction, devotion, power struggles, repression, insurrection, labour, fear, blood and survival. And also beauty.
Rosa Martínez
Artistic Director & Head Curator
Malta Biennale 2026
