Will there ever be another edition of Documenta? Last November, the entire selection committee responsible for selecting the esteemed quinquennial’s next artistic director resigned en masse, showing solidarity with Ranjit Hoskote, a committee member whom Documenta denounced after he signed a letter (issued by the Indian division of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement) comparing Zionism to Hindu Nationalism. The turmoil foreshadowed a major meltdown for Germany’s art scene as a whole: once a crucial cultural hub with coveted state funding for the arts, the nation has proven itself hostile to artistic expression that dissents in any way from the government’s pro-Israel stance.
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Meanwhile, in the United States, the art market has basically become a figurative-painting-industrial-complex, and museums, strapped for cash, are resorting to pandering to board members and luxury fashion brands. In institutions, art that is genuinely envelope-pushing, political, and experimental has become hard to find.
Daring artists will continue to persist, of course, but what does the future of showing and supporting their work look like? There’s a growing sense of unease.
Amid it all, the nation of Malta has started its own biennial—and proven itself a promising platform. Organized in just six months, the show opened in March and runs through May 31, with works by emerging and iconic artists scattered about the Mediterranean island. The show was initially billed as a home for the Palestine pavilion not included in the Venice Biennale, since Italy does not recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation. Unfortunately (and understandably), that pavilion did not come together—as the artistic director told me, “with an ongoing genocide, organizing aspects of logistics at a distance was more difficult than expected.” Still, a willingness to take strong stances pervades the show.
As with any new arts initiative, one should wonder: where did the money—and the motive—come from? The answer, in addition to government and arts council funding, is largely the tourism board—by today’s standards, certainly one of the more innocuous options. Though, of course, no biennial would be complete without work addressing the subject of gentrification, a phenomenon every biennial is likely to exacerbate. In Malta, the Angolan artist Edson Chagas is showing an impressive series of photographs, “Common Walls (2022-23),” of architectural fragments that, printed to scale and displayed in deep frames in a room full of frescoes, are easily mistaken for paintings, or architectural chunks he excised and then put on display. Instead, the artist says he captured moments that betray the effects of gentrification found in various urban locales—like peeling paint that gives clues about what a certain building used to be.
The biennial commissioned a number of new artworks, and also installed existing ones in some of Malta’s most gorgeous locales, framing them meaningfully anew. Rosa Baba’s film Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021), shot in Cyprus and featuring underwater and archaeological sites, is installed in tunnels that Medieval knights dug beneath Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta—where skulls are inlaid in marble floors below Caravaggio paintings. A sculpture by Guadalupe Maravilla is on view in another church, where the setting resonates beautifully with the artists’ work concerning migration and healing, and borrowing Catholic imagery. For Suez Canal Republic’s performance Embassy (2023), a performer danced with a disused exploration rover that followed her around a rocky, grassy, seaside terrain, making the environment—Gozo island—feel all the more alien.
Malta proves itself as fitting a setting as any for a global affair like a biennial. Culturally, linguistically, and geographically, it is a meeting point of influences from North Africa, Europe, and the Arab world. The Jamaican artist Simon Benjamin made this nexus visible in his installation Pillars (2023), wherein viewers peer into shipping barrels, only to find the peepholes are more like portals. Videos viewed through thick lenses make you feel like you’re looking into a telescope and across the ocean, viewing vignettes from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Tania Bruguera’s contribution lays bare some Maltese politics, too: she installed a giant EU flag and then, for a performance, hired a local graffiti artist to turn its yellow stars into a ring of barbed wire, emblazoned with a warning: THE POOR TREATMENT OF THE MIGRANTS TODAY WILL BE OUR DISHONOR TOMORROW. It served as a reminder to the Maltese of their responsibility as residents in a port for those crossing the Mediterranean—and to the European countries to the north who too often abdicate their responsibility to such hubs.
Bruguera’s was one of a smattering of political performances that took place at the opening—the genre was, until recently, a mainstay of major art events. For another, in the main square of the capital city, the Maltese duo Keit Bonnici and Niels Plotard wrapped a red telephone booth—a remnant of British colonial occupation—in bubble wrap, as if preparing it to be shipped away. The artists were protesting the Malta Planning Authority’s designation of such booths as protected elements of Maltese heritage—saying, in effect, this isn’t ours.
The Malta Biennale is not a show with a grand curatorial theme making a big statement about what art is or could or should be. But it is a platform that clearly believes in artists and their visions—something badly needed in a world increasingly asking artists to play roles in relation to shows of soft power and money laundering. Refreshingly, the organizers seem to believe in more than artists, too: at the televised opening at the Grandmaster’s Palace, the artistic director, Sofia Baldi Pighi, dressed in a ballgown, called for a ceasefire—a firm, simple statement of a kind seldom spoken so directly in so many realms of the art world.