Malta 2026 Biennale – the Fort St Elmo Main Pavilions
A thought-provoking Biennale that raises as many questions about contemporary art itself as it does about the world it seeks to address.
The term 'pavilion' comes from the Venice Biennale, where a selection of countries curate their own pavilions in the general art park.
Here in Malta, the 'pavilions' are in reality 'rooms' around the main courtyard at Fort St Elmo. The spaces vary in size and this can affect one's appreciation. The Chinese Pavilion, "The Realm of Clarity: Ecological Foresight and Civilisational Exchange in Oriental Wisdom", feels somewhat cramped in the space provided, with a lot of works crammed in. Curated by Ying Jinfei and realised by 13 contemporary artists, it weaves a "water culture" narrative through woodblock prints, ink paintings and watercolours.
There are a lot of wordy descriptions in these exhibitions, and a lot of politics. Rather than "didactic eco‑propaganda", the Chinese works propose "harmony between humanity and nature as a slow, almost calligraphic discipline, where restraint and emptiness matter as much as image". In this setting, "ecological foresight becomes inseparable from civilisational dialogue": the pavilion invites visitors to read Malta's harbours through concepts like "nourishing all beings" and "clarifying all rivers", suggesting that sustainable futures depend on mutual learning as much as technological solutions.
So far so good, but one can't help but think that in proposing a "long‑duration, trans‑Asian–Mediterranean dialogue about balance and restraint" the foreign policy of the People's Republic is being fulfilled. The aim to "link Chinese rivers to the Mediterranean Sea" sounds too like an expression of the CCP's "Bridge and Road initiative."
Other spaces are also politicised, but are more generous in what they offer to the curators, and some have sought to interact with Fort St Elmo itself. The French Pavilion, "Facing the Challenge", seems to be channelling the Fort's defensive history as a metaphor for our perceived current protections from what feels like the 'End of Times'. It presents Louis‑Paul Caron's immersive installation confronting climate crisis and generative AI as twin urgencies. Curated by Dominique Moulon, it stages strangely serene scenes amid encroaching fires, using AI‑generated imagery to question responsibility, and technological complicity. As well as our impulse to keep looking, and yet keep ignoring. A series of figures who we view from the back seem to be watching the end of the world in a series of cataclysmic fires. Passively.
Otherwise, for me perhaps the most memorable exhibition was one of the smaller ones. The Armenian Pavilion, "The Sound of What Was Never Seen", is a haunting, slow-burn meditation on erased histories and fragile remembrance. Painter and sculptor Raffi Yedalian, curated by Sona Hovhannisyan, has installed a highly successful mobile with Braquian elements. One of Fort St Elmo's stone chambers becomes a space where sound, shadow and scratched surfaces stand in for missing archives. Rather than illustrating specific events, the work evokes "the emotional afterimage of violence and displacement, asking what it means for a small nation to carry vast, often invisible trauma into a seemingly placid Mediterranean present."
Poland's "Archive of Hesitations" has similar themes, with Weronika Zalewska's work treating the archive not as a store of facts but as a choreography of omission, redaction and second thoughts. I am not sure the grainy black and white images of post industrial Poland are the best advertisement for Poland's tourist industry however.
Overall, this a thought provoking Biennale. Not least because I came away wondering if the very lengthy descriptions of what the art is trying to say, in themselves say something about the contemporary art world. Why does our art require pamphlets? Picasso's Guernica did not need much description. It communicated in itself, like a punch in the face.
