Should you visit Malta this spring, you may notice something decidedly weird is afoot. Across the public squares of its capital, Valletta, performance artists are blocking busy thoroughfares and causing havoc on packed café terraces. The Hospitaller and British military forts that dominate the capital’s famous harbour, meanwhile, are full of dysfunctional installation work, while the curio-filled vitrines of local museums are forced to compete with video art. Even the Grandmaster’s Palace – for centuries the country’s seat of power – has accommodated several dozen mini-exhibitions on the theme of ‘the Matri-archive of the Mediterranean’. As more than one artist showing work in these places told me, the venues were rather more interesting than the displays to which they had been given over.
The occasion for all this is the tiny Mediterranean nation’s first art biennale, an event that encompasses 20 or so venues spread across its two principal islands, and by my count features the work of about 70 different artists. It is well-intentioned in the conventional, left-ish art-world sense, and declarative in its way of showing it. Its constituent parts can mostly be separated into two categories: on the one hand, winsomely quirky; on the other, noisily political. Some artists’ contributions tick both boxes, while others escape the straitjacket of conformity and shock by dint of being pretty good.
If you’ve ever visited a biennale (or a triennale, a quinquennial or indeed, in the case of Germany’s Skulptur Projekte Münster, a decennial) all this will probably sound uncannily familiar. The format, conceived in Venice at the tail end of the 19th century, has since proliferated across the globe, from the USA to Brazil to India and (in a big way) China.
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