Adrian MM Abela, Charlie Cauchi, Raphael Vella

Opens Saturday, May 9

Malta will once again be present at the Venice Biennale this summer, with a pavilion in the Arsenale titled No Need to Sparkle; Experiments in Love and Revolution. The pavilion, commissioned by Arts Council Malta, which will see artists Adrian MM Abela, Charlie Cauchi and Raphael Vella represent Malta, is curated by Margerita Pulè and designed by SON Architects.

No Need To Sparkle; Experiments in Love and Revolution is conceived as a space that allows truth to reposition itself in the world; a triangulation that asks us to reconsider our convictions and introduces doubt as a framework for understanding the world with openness and empathy.

The artists in the Pavilion have created three separate works allowing their shared preoccupations to surface; preoccupations around autonomy, embodiment, authenticity versus artifice, as well as the phenomenology of the image, and myth-making as an anti-colonial force.

With Declaration of Dependence, Adrian MM Abela creates an environment that simultaneously reveals and conceals; a personification of Malta, existing within a game engine speaks directly to the viewer and delivers a unique declaration, alongside kinetic and physical pieces that further the artist’s questioning of

Charlie Cauchi’s installation Dolce extends her sustained engagement with Malta as film location and psychic terrain. Unfolding through a dreamlike visual language, introducing imitation, desire, spectacle and sadness, her large-scale installation speaks through two seminal films in cinema history.

Raphael Vella’s work unfolds as a dual-channel installation, assembling scenes and fragments from a century of Maltese protests and civic demonstrations to form Praying for a Revolution That Will Never Come – composed from archival footage, protest chants, and footage captured by the artist himself.

The three artists are representative of a maturing contemporary art sector in Malta, which lately has seen an emergence of a confident cohort of artists practicing in Malta and showing internationally.

The strengthening of the contemporary art scene in Malta is also represented in the fact that this is the first time that an independent arts organisation along with an independent gallery has been trusted with the production of the Malta Pavilion at Venice. Unfinished Art Space is a nomadic curatorial project that engages with ‘unfinished thinking’ as an approach to creative practice. In recent years, it has developed a portfolio of politically-engaged, site-specific, and research-based curatorial and collaborative projects. R Gallery is an independent gallery that works with interdisciplinary artists, showing visual, performance, literary, and sonic art, and providing a space for conversation and engagement around acute questions of our times through contemporary art.

The pavilion resonates strongly with the Biennale’s overall curatorial theme In Minor Keys, which refers to “enchantment in the face of cynicism about what art can do”. The Pavilion engages with moments of catharsis, crises of authenticity, and nation-founding; while it challenges triumphal notions of nation-founding and power, it does not do this in a cynical way. Rather it asks for reflection and empathy, and brings in some beauty and humour too - elements which are all necessary in our shared humanity.

Commissioner: Arts Council Malta

Curator: Margerita Pulè