No easy promises: Malta at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale
‘No Need to Sparkle’ is an ambitious meditation on Malta’s uneasy relationship with identity, history and self-colonisation
On an island where a 1,000-year history of subjugation has been internalised into a contemporary form of self-colonisation, No Need to Sparkle reflects on what it means to live without performing expectations imposed by the gaze of others.
Curated by Margerita Pulé and featuring work by Adrian Abela, Charlie Cauchi, and Raphael Vella, Malta’s offering at this year’s Venice Art Biennale takes its title from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
The pavilion’s ultimate proposition is that instead of continuing to ‘sparkle’ − performing an inauthentic version of ourselves in the futile search for closure to the identity question − the doubt we feel could actually be our greatest strength and a cornerstone for a new contemporary identity.
Read the full review on Times2.