Valletta Contemporary
Interview: Emilio Rapanà
Interviewed by Ann Dingli
November 2025
Emilio Rapanà is a curator for the MOMENTUM collective, working at the intersection of contemporary art, research, and collaborative practice. Together with Rachel Rits-Volloch, Rapanà curated Art from Elsewhere – 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, the exhibitions have 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 showed in Malta at Valletta Contemporary. Entitled DEEP THROAT, the edition fixed its gaze on the obscene performance of geopolitics. Rapanà spoke to Ann Dingli about some of the exhibition’s major themes.
Ann Dingli (AD): Your intersectional curation works with detachment from the actual 'events' you allude to, yet also deeply attached to some of the episodes in modern history that have had both implicit and overt consequences on the way the human collective psyche has formed. The DEEP THROAT porn film from the 70s was not just an iconographic moment in the evolution of pornography, it was also a huge comment on the evolving issues of gender power dynamics; as well as the still volatile power dynamics that exist those who create content and those who consume it. You then mix in the “Watergate” citation – which of course is also about power. The power of the civilian versus the power of the government. Can you talk a bit more about how you work together as curators to select and refine the intersection points of these very valid references?
Emilio Rapanà (ER): We always begin with a conceptual tension that must be both provocative and precise. In the case of DEEP THROAT, we borrowed a charged, almost abrasive image in order to dismantle it and reassemble it as a critical lens. The title operates as a double metaphor: on one side it points to the public spectacle of the body and of desire, made consumable through the 1972 film that sparked the so-called porno chic, bringing pornography into the mainstream; on the other, it recalls the practice of anonymous revelation that fractures power, as embodied by the Watergate informant. Holding these two poles together allows us to read the same dynamics – exposure, commodification, and the betrayal of trust – across different registers: sexual, political, and mediated.
In practical terms, the curatorial process unfolds like this:
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we identify the key figurative arc (here: exposure leading to spectacle leading to revelation);
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we map works from the collection and proposals from local artists that engage this figure, choosing pieces that amplify, contradict, or dismantle it;
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we test the staging in draft form (sequence, sightlines, light, sound) to see whether the double meaning can function experientially, not only theoretically;
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we refine the exhibition narrative by removing anything that would trivialise or sensationalise the dual reading. The aim is critical tension rather than gratuitous provocation.
The method is collaborative: we discuss every choice internally, between myself and my co-director, and in dialogue with artists and local partners to maintain ethical clarity, especially when dealing with themes such as violence, surveillance, or collective grief. This helps us avoid superficial or voyeuristic readings of the material.
AD: What can people expect visually from the show – will it sample the culture of the spectacle, or will it give a physical counter to that? What are some of the key works within the exhibition?
ER: Visually, the exhibition moves intentionally between two registers: media saturation (screens, loops, aesthetics drawn from advertising and clickbait) and material presence (objects, physical installations, site-specific interventions) that slow down the gaze. The goal is to let the viewer feel both the flow and the interruption: to expose the mechanics of spectacle and then offer spaces where rapid consumption can be unlearned. Our exhibition text deliberately uses word play in relation to the term ‘theatre of geopolitics’ so that, through our selection of artworks and their relation to one another in the pace, we can deconstruct the ‘overspectacular-isaton’ of our media culture.
All the works included in the exhibition are key works. To single out a few:
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AES+F, Inverso Mundus: a video first premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2015, allegorising the world upside-down – a pointed commentary on the theatre of geopolitics with its grotesquely inverted values.
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Vadim Zakharov, BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About: the video performance is a sharp, tragicomic parody of political discourse, in which meaning itself collapses into the noise of cartoon catastrophes.
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Nina E. Schönefeld, The Anatomy of Political Scandals: a cinematic choreography of censorship – an alluring dissection of democracy’s glossy surfaces and the rot beneath; a stark warning not to let history repeat itself.
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Shahar Marcus, Seeds: a video performance as a parable of cyclical conflict and fragile hope, questioning how we cultivate peace on ground perpetually re-mined – physically, politically, and ideologically.
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Duška Malešević, Better Luck | Better Fuck Next Time: suspended in the seductive glow of this lightbox installation, the two phrases flicker between sincerity and cynicism, hope and humiliation – a linguistic striptease that captures the very condition of our time: the obscene theatre of geopolitics and the commodification of desire, empathy, and even failure itself.
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Zhou Xiaohu, The Gooey Gentleman and Conspiracy: two video animations drawn directly onto the human body which enact a literal and metaphorical body politic – a performance where creation, control, and corruption play out across flesh – turning the body into a subversive stage for political theatre.
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Nezaket Ekici, But All That Glitters Is Not Gold: a powerful video performance in which the golden cage, a timeless emblem of luxury and captivity, becomes a metaphor for the systems that confine women under the guise of protection or prosperity – from patriarchal expectations to state power, from religious orthodoxy to the false freedoms of consumer culture.
These and the 14 other outstanding artists bring both irony and gravity into this exhibition. Working across video, performance, installation, sculpture, and painting they do not avert their gaze from the traumas of our time but insist on looking deeper, with complexity, nuance, empathy – and often with sardonic humour – at the forces shaping our shared reality.
Some spaces will function as "surplus-screens", accumulations of imagery that echo contemporary oversaturation, while others will act as chambers of attention, hosting slower installations that require time and participation. This alternation is designed to foreground the contrast between quick consumption and contemplative experience.
AD: Can you talk about the genesis of your collective? How do you convene, exchange ideas, and ensure that they are captured without being diluted across the shows you put on. How do you select the artists you work with when you move from show to show?
ER: MOMENTUM began as a platform for time-based art and has grown into an international network producing exhibitions, residencies, and performance programming. Our curatorial practice extends this model: a small curatorial structure operating through cooperation and exchange, forming partnerships with local institutions, engaging in ongoing dialogue with artists, and building on a living archive and collection that provide both historical and critical grounding.
How we remain focused and avoid dilution:
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short, intensive curatorial research phases supported by internal meetings and consultations with artists;
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rigorous documentation (texts, technical sheets, recordings) that accompanies the work from one edition to the next;
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a strong curatorial filter: each exhibition maintains a clear thematic core, and we decline proposals that do not contribute directly to the conceptual tension;
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continual dialogue with partners and artists to ensure the project responds to the local context without losing its integrity.
Artist selection is hybrid: we draw from the MOMENTUM Collection, invite artists already engaged with the theme, and integrate local artists or site-specific proposals to ensure that each edition genuinely belongs to its place.
AD: Can you talk about your analysis of Malta and how your subject-matter, approach, and curatorial style has moulded according to the specificity of the island context – if it has?
ER: Yes. The Maltese context has been central in shaping both the installation and the tone of the exhibition. Malta is a geopolitical crossroads, historically and today, carrying very tangible traces: fortified structures and maritime routes, migration pressures, and the recent political trauma of a journalist assassinated for uncovering corruption. Situating DEEP THROAT here means that the exhibition cannot remain a theoretical exercise. It becomes a site-specific reading of exposure and secrecy as they operate within the island.
Practical consequences:
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integrating Maltese artists into the narrative to produce local counterpoints;
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opting for more restrained presentation choices in certain rooms, out of respect for collective wounds, and more aggressive ones in others to create spatial dialectics;
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developing discursive programming (talks and performances) involving local practitioners to contextualise the works in relation to Malta’s political and media history.
AD: You talk about the "obscene performance of contemporary geopolitics"; about how audiences are both numbed, exhausted and sickened by the internet consumer culture, yet are also its authors. I am hugely fascinated by the culture of digital voyeurism. My question is about time – hasn't humanity's unrelenting obsession with watching each other act out obscenely always been prevalent? The internet is just one infrastructure out of countless that human beings built over time – each of which have served a need to marinate in one another's humiliation, frivolity, and on some occasions, genuine admiration. Can you comment on the role of this 'infrastructure' versus the pure human instinct to build it?
ER: It is a foundational question. Our position is that the human impulse to observe, judge, and lose oneself in the spectacle of others is ancient. Shakespeare said it best: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. Greek tragedy, public squares, political pamphlets, and lurid journalism are all infrastructures that formalised curiosity and the desire for the visibility of others. What has changed is the form and scale of the infrastructure: the web, social media, and instantaneous media transform a human impulse into an economy of attention with profound consequences for privacy, responsibility, and vulnerability.
More concretely:
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the impulse predates the technology; the infrastructure makes it replicable, monetisable, and algorithmically amplified;
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this infrastructure reshapes power dynamics: who looks, who is looked at, and who profits from the looking;
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art can reveal this layering, not to demonise technology but to show how media infrastructures modulate desire, compassion, and cruelty.
In the exhibition we aim to a) show the historical continuity of the voyeuristic impulse; b) highlight how contemporary infrastructures turn it into an economic and political circuit; c) offer experiences that disrupt the flow and return time, empathy, and care.