Constellation Malta

Curator Rosa Martinez, first female director of the Venice Biennale in 2005, brings an experimental and multi-disciplinary project to generate dialogue about contemporary art and popular culture in public spaces and heritage sites all over the Maltese archipelago.

A contemporary art exhibition at various heritage sites sheds new light on megalithic sites like Ħaġar Qim, the fortified cities of Mdina and the Citadel, and other historical and popular venues on the Islands. Just as celestial constellations were shaped to provide orientation, the artistic interventions in Constellation Malta will propose points, routes and new itineraries to navigate the local crossover of social, political, economic and artistic contexts. Moving from the local to the cosmic, the project will address the complexities of our contemporary world.

Throughout the centuries, constellations have served as tools for orientation and navigation, both in a geographic and in an existential way. Recent scientific discoveries have shown that, among celestial constellations, there is a specific typology called “dark cloud constellations”, which are formed by a magma of dense and impenetrable shadows of nebulae where new stars and matter are born.

The exhibition associates the term ‘constellation’ with the name Malta, lending certain locations in the Maltese archipelago metaphorical weight. The sites become meaningful stars, nodes that guide our journey through the physical and cultural topographies which are illuminated by the various artworks.

By unveiling the meaning embodied in these new “stars”, visitors and passers by become voyagers, empowered to undertake their own unique journeys towards understanding and interpretation.

Since the end of 2016, an ongoing campaign of delegitimisation and criminalisation has systematically targeted NGOs engaged in search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea. These two videos offer a counter investigation that questions the authorities’ version of the events, while showing how humanitarian and security logics collide.