Exhibition poster of Art From Elsewhere

 

Art From Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT

A collective exhibition: AES+F, Inna Artemova, Aaron Bezzina, Andreas Blank, Claudia Chaseling, Gabriel Doucet Donida, Margret Eicher, Nezaket Ekici, Mariana Hahn, Anna Jungjohan, Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham), Duška Malešević, Shahar Marcus, Milovan Destil Markovic, Almagul Menlibayeva, Kirsten Palz, Nina E. Schönefeld, David Szauder, Vadim Zakharov, Zhou Xiaohu

Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch & Emilio Rapanà

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Performance Program:

31 October: Kirsten Planz performed by Rachelle Bezzina

20 November: Gabriel Doucet Donida

29 November: Rachelle Bezzina

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Art from Elsewhere is a series of site-specific travelling exhibitions reframing the MOMENTUM Collection in relation to global urgencies and local contexts. Launched in 2021, to mark MOMENTUM’s 10th anniversary, it has taken place in Germany, Korea, Uzbekistan, Serbia, and Mexico. Each edition takes on a new unique form, developed in partnership with the host institutions, but always anchored in the conviction that moving images move us, and that artworks remain indispensable as windows onto the world. For its sixth edition, Art from Elsewhere comes to Malta - presented in partnership with Valletta Contemporary as part of MOMENTUM’s 15th Anniversary Program. Entitled DEEP THROAT, this edition fixes its gaze on the obscene performance of geopolitics. At the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Malta’s layered histories, shaped by centuries of geopolitical struggles, secrecy, and contradictions, make it an especially resonant site for this new chapter in MOMENTUM’s Art from Elsewhere exhibition series.
 

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As we approach the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century of human history, we should really know better by now. Yet war, disease, and inequality continue to run rampant, despite all the great advances in human knowledge, science, and technology. We now live in a world paradoxically exceeding itself – in an age of “post-everything”: post-modern, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-digital, post-pandemic, marching inexorably towards the post-human. We are losing our humanity in a world ever more distorted by the obscene theatre of geopolitics - a crude spectacle of power, propaganda, corruption, and control that plays out daily across our screens like a grotesque form of entertainment. Art from Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT confronts this state of affairs by reframing the MOMENTUM Collection in dialogue with Maltese artists, as a lens through which to examine how art first foresaw, and now reflects, resists, and refracts the obscenity of geopolitics that dominates the global stage. In the pervasive cycle of exhibitionism and voyeurism which drives our popular culture today, perhaps it is only art which will help us hold on to our humanity.

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The title DEEP THROAT exploits a deliberately gaudy double-edged metaphor for geopolitics as obscene spectacle. On the one hand, it recalls the infamous 1972 porn film - a cultural landmark in the mainstreaming of pornography, where x-rated exposure became popular entertainment. On the other, it invokes the codename of the anonymous informant who exposed the Watergate scandal in 1974, a figure whose whispered revelations toppled the Nixon presidency. Between pornographic exposure and political disclosure, Deep Throat names the contradictions of our current condition: a world increasingly hostile to surveillance and state secrecy, even as politicians and publics alike voluntarily bare their private lives on social media. We distrust surveillance yet surrender our privacy willingly; we decry intrusion even as we compulsively perform our lives for clicks, likes, and followers. Likewise, where power once operated behind closed doors, today it performs itself in full frontal view - lurid and relentlessly sensationalized. World leaders strut, rant, and overshare like influencers, states stage- manage leaks like marketing campaigns, news is fake while TV is reality, and the public scrolls endlessly between catastrophe and confession. Globally, governance has mutated into a grotesque double act: a striptease of truth and a peepshow of corruption, where secrecy and exposure collapse into the same obscene performance – politics endlessly rehearsing its own undoing, while the rest of us can’t look away. Like porn, politics and popular culture get off on being watched.

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If earlier editions of Art from Elsewhere sought to provide windows onto the world - this edition confronts the impossibility of looking away. The screens that once connected us to elsewhere now overwhelm us with images of war, displacement, exploitation, and the weaponization of truth itself. This is a visual economy where information, like desire, is commodified, distorted, and consumed at speed - an obscene circulation of images that blurs the boundaries between politics, pornography, and spectacle. From wars broadcast in real time to the commodification of crisis and catastrophe, we are compelled to swallow a ceaseless stream of images that reduce human suffering to consumable entertainment.

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Art from Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT confronts this condition by insisting that art can offer another way of seeing, feeling, imagining, and being. Where geopolitics turns the world into obscene spectacle, the artworks in this exhibition open windows onto complexity, difference, and humanity. Against this backdrop, we bring together works by 20 international artists from Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Malta, Russia, Serbia, and Turkey. This dialogue between the MOMENTUM Collection and artists from Malta connects two geopolitical crossroads, Malta and Berlin, through critical counterpoints and shared urgencies. The selected works focus on global issues that touch us all, regardless of where we live or where we have come from. They probe the fractures and contradictions of globalization, expose the violence of inequality, interrogate the shifting terrains of gender and identity, and lay bare the ecological destruction that underpins our economies and politics. These works do not avert their gaze from the traumas of our time but insist on looking deeper, with complexity, nuance, empathy - and often with sardonic humor - at the forces shaping our shared reality.

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In Malta - an island nation where history is etched into stone fortresses and contemporary realities are written upon countless layers of history - Art from Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT takes on urgent resonance. Positioned at the intersection of Europe, Africa, and The Middle East, Malta has long been a theatre of geopolitics: a fortress island fought over by empires, a crossroads of migration and exile, and a frontline of global trade. Today, it remains a space marked by the flows of people, capital, and information that shape our contemporary condition. And it remains a place forever scarred by the brutal silencing of its own “deep throat” – the 2017 assassination of a journalist for daring to expose the corruption of power. Her murder remains a cultural wound, a reminder of how dangerous the act of revealing can be in a world addicted to spectacle but hostile to truth. To place Art from Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT in the context of Malta is to situate it in a landscape where the depth of history, the legacies of colonialism, the pressures of globalization, the politics of borders, and the traffic of information and finance converge - an environment that makes the obscene, and often absurd, performance of power all too tangible.

 

While the sensationalized theatre of power continues to unfold on the global stage, across nations and screens, the works in this exhibition cut through the spectacle to reveal the human conditions behind it - the everyday struggles, desires, and solidarities that persist despite, and against, the relentless performance of geopolitics as a striptease of disclosure and control. In an era where politics increasingly resembles pornography - provocative, performative, and desensitizing - this exhibition asks: how can we look away so as to see and feel the world anew? In this moment of oversaturation, where both secrecy and confession are staged for mass consumption in a visual economy which commodifies crisis - turning both information and desire into consumable spectacle - this exhibition reminds us that to look at the world through the lens of good art is not to consume, but to encounter; not to be desensitized, but to be touched. Please join us in contemplating the (un)quiet poetry, fragile beauty, biting humor, and stubborn humanity with which artists respond to a world in which politics has become the new pornography.