NO NEED TO SPARKLE: Experiments in Love and Revolution
Malta Pavilion | La Biennale di Venezia 2026
ARTIGLIERIE, ARSENALE, VENICE
9 May - 22 November 2026
ADRIAN MM ABELA
CHARLIE CAUCHI
RAPHAEL VELLA
Curated by Margerita Pulè
COMMISSIONED BY ARTS COUNCIL MALTA
Architects: SON Architecture / Mark Sullivan and Julian Vassallo
Project Manager: Tamara Burr
Outreach & Partnerships: Kathrine Maj
Visual Identity: Alexandra Pace
Social Media: Alessia Caruana
Producers: Unfinished Art Space with R Gallery
More information here: maltapavilion2026.com
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.
Photography by Julian Vassallo & Samuele Cherubini