On its 10th anniversary, Arts Council Malta has launched Retold – an initiative through which projects by Maltese artists and creatives, displayed at the Venice Art Biennale and the London Design Biennale, are being exhibited in Malta, for the first time, and their story retold.
Urban Fabric, Revisiting Maleth, URNA – the winner of the London Design Biennale, 2025, The Ship (unseen), Homo Melitensis and ARCANGELO SASSOLINO: Diplomazija Astuta – Conflict: Fire, Steel and Paper are the projects to be exhibited in historical places around Malta.
Urban Fabric by Open Square Collective
Exhibition Dates: 30th June – 2nd August. Location: Imdina Ditch
Open Square is an art and design collective consisting of four members: Luke Azzopardi, Trevor Borg, Matthew Joseph Casha and Alessia Deguara. These four professional artists are known and respected names on the local and international artistic circuit, having already collaborated on high-profile projects. The team also includes two support members – Ramona Depares on communications and Gilbert Micallef as external advisor on financial matters.
Urban Fabric re-contextualises the Maltese village core by merging two elements – traditional city planning and the Phoenician-Maltese tradition of fabric production and dyeing. Open Square Collective is honoured that Urban Fabric has received the Best International Achievement Award at the Premju għall-Arti 2023. The installation uses wood, recycled stone and organic fabric that is sustainable and certified eco-friendly as its main components. This is in accordance with the artists’ ethos of recyclability and eco-consciousness. These components create a ‘street-like’ layout that enables the viewer to interact directly with the installation. The wider context in which the original concept and ideas are located is based on research that was carried out at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Here, the team retraced the footsteps of the Phoenicians, experiencing the fine fabrics and artefacts of the time and using this experience as foundation. The installation uses as its source material documentation about how the Phoenicians used to dye wool and linen garments and draws on eco-friendly methods as an alternative to ancient practices. Thus, Urban Fabric strives to encourage discourse about the environment by presenting a well-researched, thought-provoking installation that combines aesthetic with sustainable spatial design awareness.
Our experience at the London Design Biennale was incredibly rewarding. Urban Fabric, which occupied the main courtyard at Somerset House was met with widespread positive feedback and media coverage. The Open Square Collective would like to extend heartfelt thanks to Arts Council Malta for supporting this important showcase and for the opportunity to represent Malta on such a prestigious international platform.
Revisiting Maleth
Exhibition Dates: 15th July – 31st August. Location: Natural History Museum, Mdina.
The thematic title of the curatorial narrative initially traced for the Venice Art Biennale of 2019, is inspired by the island of Malta itself, its historical origins and its spatial presence in contemporary reality within the Mediterranean Sea. Placing Malta at the centre of its narrative, the main title word derives from one of the possible interpretations of the origins of the island’s name; Maleth. Maleth, a Phoenician word, evokes the primeval origins of the island’s existence and literally translates to Haven or Port, a quality the island inspired to all that traversed the waters of the Mediterranean Sea through the ages and that continues to withstand throughout the island’s history.
URNA
Exhibition Dates: September to November. Location: Ħaġar Qim, Qrendi.
URNA is a sculptural installation and ceremonial space that reimagines architecture’s relationship with death. Conceived as a symbolic centrepiece for the Malta Pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2025, the work brings together reconstituted Maltese limestone, steel, film and sound to propose new rituals for contemporary life and beyond. Drawing from the island’s prehistoric past and projecting toward its metaphysical future, URNA is both artefact and invocation — a quiet act of resistance against the spectacle, and a space where presence, absence, and matter coexist.
The Ship (unseen)
Exhibition Dates: 4th October – 16th November. Location: Inquisitor’s Palace, Birgu.
The Ship (unseen) builds upon and reimagines the concepts explored in I WILL FOLLOW THE SHIP, where artist
Matthew Attard and curator Elyse Tonna revisit the intersections of maritime heritage, drawing and digital
technology. Situated at the Maritime Museum in Birgu Marina, this new site-specific project takes the historical
ship graffiti that inspired the previous work and expands it into a new context. It draws on the symbolism of the sea, the significance of ship graffiti and the integration of technology in artistic expression, all within the framework of an immersive experience.
Homo Melitensis: An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters
Exhibition Dates: 3rd October – 30th October. Location: MUŻA, Valletta.
Co-curated by Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek, Homo Melitensis: An Incomplete Inventory in 19 Chapters is the title of the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Commissioned by Arts Council Malta, the exhibition explores the notion of identity at a time when the issue has become more urgent than ever. ‘Homo Melitensis’ means ‘Maltese Man’ and the pavilion in Venice is being used as a platform on which the very idea of a national identity as well as the national imaginaries that are constructed around issues like territory, memory, religion and language can be presented and simultaneously critiqued. The ‘incomplete inventory’ is a complex installation that came about through a combination of academic research, conversations with several theoreticians, scientists, writers, artists and curators in various fields and an artistic re-imagining of local realities.
BURNING WATERS Diplomazija Astuta – Retold works on steel and paper by ARCANGELO SASSOLINO curated by KEITH SCIBERRAS
Exhibition Dates: 9th October – 3rd January. Location: Victor Pasmore Gallery, Valletta.
In this project of monumental proportions, the artist pushed the boundaries of metal sculpture in ways that had
not been seen before. The installation, set in the halls of the Biennale’s Arsenale, resonated this
tension between heat and metal, fire and water. Standing in front of the sheer mass and space of a ‘contemporary inferno’ of droplets of molten steel neutralised by water, its audience stood as witnesses to a captivatingly powerful yet silent unfolding event. Reflection on human suffering transcended both space and time. For this project, the point of departure for Sassolino’s work is the drop of molten steel and its impact on paper.