From Caravaggio to Korea: How Malta’s artists are breaking out of the baroque

The BEJN pavilion connects Malta and Korea through poetry, sacred ropes, festa traditions and space data. Julien Vinet wants you to picture twilight with him. The sun will lay itself like a crown atop the limestone buildings. Then rivers of red and orange will flood into the shabby studio he shares with his creative partner, Sam Alekksandra. As another day slips into night over Malta’s Three Cities, the warm light will wash over faded pink walls plastered with posters for their pop-up poetry events. “Sunset is special here,” Vinet says with conviction. The French artist, transplanted to Malta about a decade ago after eight years in Japan, has a knack for finding unexpected meaning in familiar moments. He likes to mine their depths until he finds a truth worth exposing – or what he calls “obsolete beauty”. It’s why he and Alekksandra, the duo behind the collective Ponks, are drawn to liminal things caught in the in-between, like their sunset ritual. And maybe it’s no coincidence that both have found creative freedom in a country defined by its own in-betweenness. For Vinet, Malta has given him time and space to pursue both sides of himself: the punk and the perfectionist. For Alekksandra, a Maltese journalist turned poet, it has given her a point of reference to develop her own artistic language. That kind of creative latitude is relatively new to the country. For years, artists in Malta had few galleries and even fewer pathways to show their work. Now, with new institutions like the Malta Biennale and a growing international profile, the arts scene here is beginning to look very different. The space between Malta is an oddity, a small group of islands in the Mediterranean that has spent millennia absorbing one culture after another. Its cuisine spans African, Mediterranean and British influences. It has the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet. It has Phoenician boats, Catholic churches and UK crests. Despite its plurality of influences, Maltese art for many years was stuck in one episode of the past. As a guide would later tell me in Valletta’s Muza Gallery: “Baroque this, baroque that – for many people in Malta, real art is only baroque.” Now, cracks in the baroque façade are starting to show. Before meeting Vinet and Alekksandra, I go on a short tour of Valletta’s art scene, starting – as most do – with Caravaggio’s masterpiece, ‘The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist’ at St John’s Cathedral. But there’s more to Malta’s art scene than saints and martyrs. Apart from Muza and the new MICAS, Malta’s first national museum dedicated to contemporary art, galleries like Valletta Contemporary have provided a space for more daring work – something many artists told me Malta had lacked for years. Founded by architect and artist Norbert Francis Attard, the gallery has transformed a 400-year-old warehouse in the city’s lower east end into a two-floor showcase for Maltese and international artists. When I visit, it’s showing ‘Still Time’, a 50-year retrospective of photographer Joseph P. Smith curated by Lisa Gwen Chetcuti. “In Malta, there are very few private galleries, and they operate differently than they do in London or New York,” Chetcuti tells Euronews Culture. The galleries often don’t own the work, meaning they aren’t taking on inventory they need to sell – and artists don’t necessarily want them to, either. “In a small country, they don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket,” she explains. “This exhibition was all done through public funding.” Valletta Contemporary is an answer to the lack of galleries, but Attard’s ambitions extend beyond exhibitions in the Maltese capital. He runs a residency at his home and studio in Gozo that brings artists from abroad and supports collaborative projects and exhibitions. He is now converting his Gozo home into a public archive, with a café and garden. “I’m the kind of person who can stop being an artist during my lifetime as a conscious decision,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I stop being creative. There are a lot of ways one can create.” Breaking with tradition Back at their studio, Vinet and Alekksandra are thinking about what comes next, too. They have met up with their friend and collaborator, the sound artist Michael Quinton, to discuss their contribution to Malta’s pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, which runs from 5 September to 15 November. Called BEJN / In-Between and led by Vinet as artistic director, the pavilion brings together Attard, Ponks and Quinton in a project that connects Malta and Korea through three linked installations. Attard is creating a spatial installation that draws on Malta’s festa traditions and Korea’s Obangsaek system, using colours, tension and balance to draw attention to conflict and collective memory. Ponks is building the 'Rope Temple', a five-kilometre web of rope featuring poetry by more than 140 Maltese and Korean writers. The concept draws on Malta’s maritime traditions and geumjul, sacred Korean ropes used to ward off evil spirits. Beneath the temple, the 'Base Polygon' will divide the experience into three rooms exploring different aspects of poetry. In the first, Quinton combines recordings from Malta and Korea to make a soundscape that changes as visitors move through the space. As Vinet and Alekksandra explain the temple, Quinton plays hauntingly beautiful music from data, of all things. Drawing on his background in exosolar science, he turns data collected in outer space into sound, making patterns invisible to the human eye audible. “We always look for the start and the end, but we don’t hear the in-between,” Quinton says. “It’s really about enhancing that present moment.” Malta’s creative scene is in an in-between of its own. It hasn’t overcome the limitations artists have faced, but neither is it confined by them. “It’s very active,” Alekksandra explains, pointing to the Malta Biennale, which held its second edition this spring, as evidence of how quickly the landscape is changing. “People make do with what they have. And we keep doing that and keep growing.” She has seen it firsthand. Ponks’ events began with little more than a microphone and a poster. Now more than 100 people regularly turn up to listen and share their work. “We just offered the space, and that hole was filled,” she says. Malta goes to Gwangju The Gwangju Biennale is giving some of Malta’s locally built practices a very different setting. For Alekksandra, the connection is particularly strong because Gwangju has its own history of writers using art to respond to political upheaval. “Gwangju is known as the city of resistance, and who is at the forefront of resistance? It’s the writers. It’s the poets,” she says. “They’re the ones who give people the courage to continue [fighting] and immortalising whatever happens.” Alekksandra knows what it means to reach for poetry after trauma. Following the 2017 assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, she says poetry gave her a way to express emotions that couldn’t easily be put into ordinary words. While reaching out to artists for the exhibition, she asked an older Korean poet to read his work to her. “I couldn’t understand a word, but I just started to cry,” she recalls. “We underestimate how much we can talk to each other beyond language.” It’s a truth Vinet and Alekksandra say they have often found in Malta. “Malta is already an in-between,” Vinet says. Then he peers out the studio window. “For a few rocks in the sea, it has incredible diversity. And that’s a strength.”