THE PAVILION
NO NEED TO SPARKLE
Experiments in Love and Revolution
We feel a fracturing of reality in the air; a chasm in the sky. Global powers are realigning, populations are in flux, temperatures are rising. Our search for the truth − or the multiple truths that exist around us − is manipulated by powers hungry for gain. We juggle continuous news streams and shifting world orders, a proliferation of voices that leave us cynical and unable to act.
No Need To Sparkle: Experiments in Love and Revolution is conceived as a space that allows truth to reposition itself in the world, and that introduces uncertainty and ‘doubt’, not as a capitulation, but as a path to understanding the world with openness and empathy.
Our title is borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own; ‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself’. In the context of our pavilion, we understand ‘sparkle’ as a metaphor for ideological certainty and performative positioning on a global stage. We call for empathy rather than certainty, and we acknowledge that multiple voices and viewpoints can exist in the world contemporaneously.
Adrian MM Abela, Charlie Cauchi and Raphael Vella have created separate screen-based works, which nonetheless betray their shared preoccupations with authenticity, post-colonial self-determination, and myth-making.
Each artist parses our fictional and actual presents, anchoring their work in manifold pasts and imaginable futures. Each draws from varied sources including archival material, cinema, popular culture, and historic and spiritual texts. In doing so they travel across mythologies, histories, and cinematic illusion and eventually arrive at a form of personal resistance.
The works within the pavilion seek to deceive; they hide, misdirect and beautifully obfuscate. Moving-image holds the ability to liquefy time and space, and solid sculpture brings its own dissimulations to the table. Our sense of reality is diminished, and we, in being fooled, risk acquiring humility.
Placed centrally, and at a point where the three works’ orbits overlap is an invitation to pause and sit within the space. This invitation, that is at once physical and metaphorical, acts as a prompt for contemplation and allows us to sit together in the spirit of an agora, with openness and inquiry. Certainty can give way to doubt, making room for a world that hosts thoughtfulness, curiosity and collective empathy.
And as we engage in this space with moments of catharsis and crises of authenticity, we challenge triumphal notions of nation-founding and power, but we are not cynical in this endeavour. Meaning dissolves, truth repositions itself, and time revolves and resolves, but hope always pulses and crackles at dawn.
No Need To Sparkle therefore proposes doubt and doubting not as paralysis, but as a vital act of resistance.
Adrian MM Abela
Declaration of Dependence
(A Game of Surrender)
2023 – 2026
Stage; curtain/veil; stage lights; found coins; magnets; computer; game engine; divinatory software; built world; built figure; sound; pressure sensor; motors; fabricated coins; dance algorithm; framed drawing; seven hidden drawings (pen; hidden folder; hidden promise device (copper plated bronze); performance; game of chance; custodian interaction; website: declarationofdependence.com; dimensions: variable
Adrian MM Abela’s composition is presented as a stage divided into three temporal zones. To the left, eight coins spin on a table, representing the future. To the right, a drawing depicts the past. At the centre, viewed from an opening in the curtain, the personification of Malta exists within a game engine. Each time a visitor steps onto the rug, Melita delivers a unique declaration, assembling an experience specific to that visitor: an act of divination selected by chance for that moment. Declaration of Dependence includes additional veiled works, accessible only through interaction with the custodian, while further aspects of the work circulate through word of mouth.
Charlie Cauchi
Dolce
2026
Single‑channel 4K video, colour, sound, sculptural installation (chocolate and mixed materials)
Incorporated chocolate sculpture originally created by Tiziano Cassar for the Ħamrun Chocolate Festival
Charlie Cauchi’s installation extends her sustained engagement with Malta as both setting and psychic terrain, unfolding through a dreamlike, often surreal visual language. Here she creates a vast fresco that draws from cinema history; from the restless mood of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita to the symbolic shadow of Scott’s Gladiator, Dolce is a reflection on performance, mediation, and identity amid cultural flux. Material motifs introduce a quietly mordant play on imitation, desire, and the social meanings embedded in spectacle. Colonial residues and shifting Maltese identities generate imagery that remains both seductive and critical, and deliberately unresolved.
Raphael Vella
Praying for a Revolution That Will Never Come
2026
Dual-channel stop-motion animation, colour, sound
Industrially compressed and baled protest posters and banners
Raphael Vella stages an encounter with the residue of revolt. Praying for a Revolution That Will Never Come unfolds as a dual-channel animation assembling scenes from a century of Maltese protests, and a block of compressed protest posters and banners. Loosely referencing the Constitution of Malta’s Article 42 (Freedom of Assembly), the animation’s logic functions as a stuttering loop in which political desire fails to incarnate except in monumental representations of dissent that surface momentarily. Yet resistance endures in the very act of drawing; thousands of drawings construct a political momentum that vanishes as soon as it forms, and yet this continual postponement of revolution is precisely what returns the artist’s hand to the page.
