Malta is once again present at La Biennale di Venezia in 2026, with a pavilion titled No Need to Sparkle: Experiments in Love and Revolution showcased in the Arsenale.
Commissioned by Arts Council Malta, the pavilion sees Adrian MM Abela, Charlie Cauchi and Raphael Vella represent Malta under the curatorship of Margerita Pulè, with architectural design by SON Architects. The pavilion, which is conceived as a space that allows truth to reposition itself in the world, introduces doubt not as capitulation, but as a framework for understanding the world with openness and empathy.
The Maltese pavilion brings together three separate screen-based works that each reveal shared preoccupations with authenticity, post-colonial self-determination, myth-making, autonomy, embodiment and the phenomenology of the image. Across the project, these concerns surface through works that move between archival material, cinema, popular culture, historic and spiritual texts, creating a space which certainty gives way to reflection, curiosity and collective empathy.
With Declaration of Dependence (A Game of Surrender), Adrian MM Abela presents a composition structured as a stage divided into three temporal zones. To the left, eight coins spin on a table, representing the future. To the right, a drawing depicts the past. At the centre, viewed through an opening in the curtain, the personification of Malta exists within a game engine.
Each time a visitor steps onto the rug, Melita delivers a unique declaration, assembling an experience specific to that visitor: an act of divination selected by chance for that moment. The work includes additional veiled elements, accessible only through interaction with the custodian, while further aspects circulate through word of mouth. It is a work that simultaneously reveals and conceals, unfolding through stagecraft, built environments, software, performance and chance.
Charlie Cauchi’s Dolce is a single-channel 4K video accompanied by sculptural elements in chocolate and mixed materials. The installation extends her sustained engagement with Malta as both setting and psychic terrain, unfolding through a dreamlike, often surreal visual language.
Drawing from cinema history, from the restless mood of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita to the symbolic shadow of Scott’s Gladiator, the work reflects on performance, mediation and identity amid cultural flux. Material motifs introduce a quietly mordant play on imitation, desire and the social meanings embedded in spectacle, while colonial residues and shifting Maltese identities generate imagery that remains both seductive and critical, and deliberately unresolved.
Raphael Vella’s Praying for a Revolution That Will Never Come unfolds as a dual-channel installation composed of stop-motion animation, sound, and industrially compressed protest posters and banners. The work assembles scenes and fragments from a century of Maltese protests and civic demonstrations, drawing from archival footage, protest chants and footage captured by the artist himself.
Loosely referencing Article 42 of the Constitution of Malta, the animation functions as a stuttering loop in which political desire fails to incarnate except in monumental representations of dissent that surface momentarily. Yet, resistance endures in the act of drawing itself, as thousands of drawings construct a political momentum that vanishes as soon as it forms, returning the artist’s hand to the page through that very postponement.
Malta’s pavilion resonates strongly with the Biennale’s overall curatorial theme, In Minor Keys, engaging with moments of catharsis, crises of authenticity and nation-founding while challenging triumphal notions of power without cynicism. Instead, it asks for reflection and empathy, and makes room for beauty and humour as necessary elements of our shared humanity.
Together, the three artists’ works represent a maturing contemporary art scene in Malta, one that has seen the emergence of a strong, experimental, multi-disciplinary cohort of artists practising in Malta and showing internationally.
The Malta Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2026 runs from May 9 to November 22, 2026.
