Valletta Contemporary
Interview: Gabriel Zammit on Rebecca Bonaci
Interviewed by Ann Dingli
October 2025
Gabriel Zammit is a Maltese curator, writer, and creative producer whose practice explores liminality, craft, and outsider art. He has led the curatorial programme at the Malta Society of Arts since 2002, simultaneously teaching art theory at the University of Malta. Zammit is curated for Rebecca Bonaci’s solo show at Valletta Contemporary (VC). Bonaci is a Maltese visual artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and illustration, engaging deeply with female identity, memory, and Malta’s ancestral past. Her notable solo show ĠUF, which focused on motherhood, and VC’s current show, WENS: Comfortable Silence, which explores intimate daily rituals. Her work presents tender, meditative subject-matter rooted in personal and cultural narratives. Zammit speaks to Ann Dingli about Bonaci’s latest body of work.
Ann Dingli (AD): Gabriel, in your curatorial note, you say that “in an era where productivity is prioritised over nearly everything else, the choice to valorise moments of intimacy that have no other end but themselves, becomes quietly radical”, Does the choice need to be ‘radical’? Does this statement not undermine the central notion of the show – which as I see it is extruding the qualities of the domestic and everyday without any of the expected solicitousness or ceremony of today’s culture of consumption?
Gabriel Zammit (GZ): As a curator, I am not only thinking about the artist’s intention but also about what the work does independently. I can say for certain that Rebecca did not intentionally place any radicality into her work. These works, the drawings especially, are little meditations for her, made in the quiet moments of her day. But when I encountered them, their courage – their daring to be nothing other than themselves, in contradiction to the maximising narratives of the current state of capitalist existence – stood out to me.
One question I always ask myself when staging an exhibition is: how does what we are doing engage with the world out there? In this case, it was clear to me that these works suggest an alternative way of being to the one we are used to, where maximising productivity is the ultimate aim of every moment. Hope inheres in small gestures, tiny unseen moments that propose alternative worlds. This is what Rebecca is doing in her own quiet way, and I thought that was indeed radical and worthy of exploration.
AD: I’m interested in the statement around standing “in contrast to the ego-driven construction of self that has become commonplace in the contemporary moment”. The cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh recently published Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, where she talks about a broad cultural style that is driven by economic conditions fed by instantaneity, transparency, identity politics and direct experience. She links it all with the machine of capitalism, and generally draws out a sinister link between the cultural obsession of self-promotion and capitalist systems. The work Rebecca has produced is both personal and universal. Does it comment on the ‘self’ vis-a-vis its responsibility to society?
GZ: In this exhibition Rebecca is thinking very actively about the past and about social networks in terms of how they support the self in this space of comfortable silence. But she also takes a further step, thinking about what she herself is to the people around her, and how deep meaning can be found in the act of giving from oneself. Her four-year-old daughter, Nina, and her husband, James, are deeply part of this exhibition. So ultimately, her work is not about taking, but about giving. Of course, the universal point here is that if we were all to think and act in this way, we’d be far better off as a collective.
I think this comes through most strongly in her landscape works. Many of her figures are placed within, or actually become, landscapes themselves. Rebecca is alluding to actual places familiar to her, but also, in turning her own body into a landscape, there is an intimation of what comes next, and of what she herself is for others. There is an acute awareness of passing time in Bonaci’s work, so her choice to place figures within landscapes – sometimes very small figures within much larger ones – alludes to the beautifully melancholic idea that we are tiny specks in a much wider terrain.
AD: I am deeply interested in the aspect of legacy presented in Rebecca’s sculptural works – the connection with the prehistoric Maltese sleeping lady and Maltese women since and before. This both taps into the mundanity of legacy rituals and their representative images, as well as the monumentality of their connotations of dignity, fertility, feminine power and more. Can you talk about that duality?
GZ: There is something strange and mysterious about the prehistoric Sleeping Lady sculptures. We tend to pile narratives onto them, calling them goddesses of fertility and speculating about their meaning, when in fact we really don’t know much at all about them. For all we know they were ordinary people, just living their lives. That idea also brings them closer, makes them more relatable – the human particularity within the symbol – and allows us to think more directly of them as ancestors. Rebecca plays with this idea in her own sculptures: they are ordinary human women, they are us, but they have now been elevated to the status of star-studded goddess. On the one hand, this reminds us of the latent potential in each of us, our place in history, and so on; but on the other hand, it acknowledges that we don’t really know where we’re coming from or where we are going – only that there is a fundamental shared humanity across time that is deeply meaningful.
The sculptures emerged quite spontaneously when Rebecca was playing with her daughter, and we have placed them so that there is a sculpture within every space of the exhibition. They function as anchor points, weaving a narrative thread throughout a space that is otherwise organised non-hierarchically.
AD: Some of Rebecca’s notes about creating this show are deeply personal. Are these integrated into the exhibition in some way – can the audience read them? Does this impede or add to their reading of the loftier themes you present?
GZ: The writings were a crucial starting point for me; they gave me a feeling, a vibe, that I could follow into Rebecca’s inner world. Her writing is tactile and impressionistic, and we included some fragments within the first room as a sort of introduction to the exhibition. This show is, after all, about her life, and bringing some of her writing into the exhibition space foregrounds that notion because it captures fragments of her experience in a very direct way. The pictures and the sculptures, even though they are mainly figurative, function at a higher level of abstraction.
AD: My reading of the work is that it is really about love. Do you think people still want to think and talk about love?
GZ: The work is indeed full of love. It is life-affirming in a time when there is a lot to bring us down. I don’t think there will ever be a time when we won’t want to talk about love. It is, after all, what we have done with each other since the beginning of time, and when it is not present, its absence is felt sorely – and becomes an equally powerful force to wrangle with.