5 September – 5 November 2026
Horangassy, Gwangju, South Korea
Arts Council Malta, with the support of the Ministry for Arts, Culture, and the National Heritage, the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund, is commissioning the first-ever participation in the Gwangju Biennale, one of Asia’s most prestigious platforms for contemporary art.
Opening on 5 September and running until 15 November 2026 in Gwangju, the Biennale – now in its 16th edition – provides a global stage for experimental and innovative artistic practices. Titled You must change your life and led by Singaporean artist and curator Ho Tzu Nyen as Artistic Director, this edition explores the transformative power of art in a time of multiple crises and urgencies.
Marking this significant milestone, the Malta Pavilion will present BEJN / IN-BETWEEN, a major new commission that brings together four leading contemporary artistic voices from the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo: Norbert Francis Attard, PONKS (Sam Alekksandra & Julien Vinet) and Michael Quinton. Working together as the BEJN Kollettiva, the artists have been undertaking a three-month residency in Gwangju since May, working closely with Arts Council Malta to prepare the Malta Pavilion. The artists are creating site-specific installations that will unfold as one collaborative exhibition at Horanggasy, one of the Biennale’s main exhibition venues. The project is curated by Moon Hyun Jeoung and managed by Toni Attard.
Therefore, the pavilion becomes a place where ideas, rituals, and artistic languages flow between Malta and Korea, generating an environment shaped by movement, tension, and exchange. The installations draw on shared cultural sensitivities, including the charged energy of Maltese communal traditions and the protective symbolism found in Korean spiritual practices.
Rather than re-creating these customs, the artists are working with their underlying emotional textures – ideas of gathering, protection, rivalry, devotion, and release – translating them into spatial and sensory experiences. Visitors will encounter environments that capture the feeling of being suspended between forces, where the connections formed are as important as the boundaries they cross.
The Artists
Unfolding through a constellation of interconnected spaces, BEJN moves through tension, poetry, passage, sound, movement, and digital interaction. It presents Malta’s first national pavilion as an evolving encounter between artists, traditions, and technologies, where the in-between becomes a site of creativity, connection, and resonance.
In the Art Polygon, Norbert Francis Attard, one of Malta’s pioneers of contemporary art, creates spatial interventions that hold opposing forces in tension. Drawing from Maltese festa traditions — vibrant communal celebrations dedicated to a town’s patron saint — and Korean Obangsaek colour principles, his works explore balance through colour, elasticity, light, and structure. Using stretched elastic bands, mirrored surfaces, illuminated elements, and architectural metal forms, Attard transforms the space into a field of movement, pressure, and reflection. For example, PERISTYLE – a penetrable sculpture constructed from hollow metal sections and gold-painted forms reminiscent of festa decorations — places ritual celebration directly against contemporary devastation, drawing uneasy parallels between Malta’s historical culture of siege, collective commemoration, and the ongoing international conflicts.
PONKS transforms the Glass Polygon into ROPE TEMPLE, where hundreds of suspended ropes form a room within a room. At its centre, a dense tree-like structure of ropes rises through the space, rooting the installation both physically and symbolically. The work ties together the ritual significance of Geumjul — traditional Korean sacred ropes intended to ward off evil spirits — with Malta’s deep rope traditions, from maritime vessels to religious processions, where rope becomes both functional necessity and sacred symbol. Scripts of Maltese and Korean poetry cover the surrounding glass, creating an immersive environment where language, material, and ritual dissolve fixed cultural boundaries. Visitors ascend through the tree-like structure towards a final intervention at the top of the building, where the installation resolves into a luminous gesture suspended above the city.
The Base Polygon forms the subterranean roots of the temple through three interconnected rooms that explore different facets of poetry: musicality, word, and worlds. Beneath the Glass Polygon, the space unfolds as a quieter, more introspective counterpart to the installations above. In the first room, Michael Quinton’s soundscape draws on field recordings captured across Malta and Korea, combining sonic manipulation, resonance, silence, and immersive surround sound. The work treats sound as a condition of being, creating an environment of deep listening and reflection.
Alongside this, the Portal programme hosts an exchange between Maltese and Korean artists performing across various sites, inviting audiences into the visual worlds and personal responses of poets and performers in relation to their surroundings. The final room is dedicated to an anthology: an experimental publication that documents the creative process, poetic contributions, and artistic exchanges, offering visitors a tangible “fragment” of the in-between to take with them.
Horangassy – Venue for the Malta Pavilion at the Gwangju Pavilion
Norbert Francis Attard. Photo by Edward DeGabriele.
PONKS. Photo by Edward DeGabriele.
Michael Quinton. Photo by Edward DeGabriele.
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