GWANGJU.- Arts Council Malta will be participating in the prestigious Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2026, with the project BEJN / IN-BETWEEN. This will be the first time Malta is taking part in this event, which has become firmly established as one of Asia’s foremost contemporary art events, serving as a stage for leading contemporary artists to present experimental and innovative work.

The artistic team for BEJN / IN-BETWEEN is made up of four leading contemporary artists based on the Mediterranean islands Malta and Gozo: Norbert Francis Attard, Sam Alekksandra, Julien Vinet, and Michael Quinton. Toni Attard is the project manager.

The project will see the artists mapping out an ecosystem that unfolds between Malta and Korea through immersive installations, transforming the Malta Pavilion into a living threshold. The Pavilion will forge a new in-between: a sacred site reimagined for an age of polarisation: not as refuge from tension, but as a crucible where opposing energies generate their light.

The artists and the concepts

Norbert Francis Attard: ArtPolygon

In the ArtPolygon, artist-architect Norbert Francis Attard introduces this sense of negotiated tension throughout the building. The work will see multitudes of thin, stretched elastic bands that reach across the walls, ceilings, and floors of the two rooms—an explosion of bands, like a firework in suspension—that gradually morph in colour, referencing Maltese individuality but also Malta’s most iconic gathering of thresholds: the festa.

Sam Alekksandra and Julien Vinet: PONKS—Rope Temple

PONKS introduces a release of this tension through a contemporary, collaborative ritual, creating the first-ever large-scale poetic participatory installation linking Korea and Malta. For the Glass Polygon, the duo will construct a (con)temporary temple of poetry, filling the glass walls with verses by poets and amateurs from both countries, and sanctified by hundreds of sacred ropes. The installation will be called Rope Temple. From the outside, Rope Temple announces itself through verse: Maltese and South Korean poetry will cover the entire outer walls of the Glass Polygon (Library) like a living skin of protective poetry, poetic ex-voto visible to all.

Michael Quinton and co: BasePolygon

In the basement of the Glass Polygon, the ‘crypt’ of the rope temple will introduce three rooms presenting three stages of the portal opened between Malta and Korea on the surface.

Arts Council Malta, under the auspices of the Ministry for the Arts, Lands and Local Government is the Commissioner of the Malta Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale 2026. The project is being led by the International Cultural Relations Directorate headed by Annabelle Stivala and Dr Romina Delia on behalf of Arts Council Malta.

The Gwangju Biennale will be held from September to November 2026.

Artists: Norbert Francis Attard, Sam Alekksandra, Julien Vinet, and Michael Quinton