Malta Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale: BEJN / IN-BETWEEN

Arts Council Malta presents BEJN / IN-BETWEEN, Malta’s first-ever participation in the Gwangju Biennale, bringing together Norbert Francis Attard, PONKS (Sam Alekksandra & Julien Vinet), and Michael Quinton as the BEJN Kollettiva. Developed through a three-month residency in Gwangju, the project unfolds across Horanggasy as a site-specific constellation of installation, poetry, sound, performance, and moving image.

BEJN—the Maltese word for “between”—takes the in-between as both a physical and conceptual condition: a space of tension, dialogue, transformation, and possibility. Connecting Malta and South Korea, two cultures geographically distant yet shaped by strong relationships to ritual, community, and collective memory, the pavilion asks what can emerge when distinct histories and forms are placed alongside one another without being collapsed into sameness.

In dialogue with the 16th Gwangju Biennale’s overarching theme, You Must Change Your Life, proposed by Ho Tzu Nyen, BEJN / IN-BETWEEN approaches change through the threshold: between cultures and languages, the sacred and everyday, permanence and transformation, the individual and collective. Rather than resolving these positions, the exhibition inhabits the unstable space between them.

The exhibition begins in the Art Polygon with Norbert Francis Attard, whose site-specific interventions draw together Maltese festa traditions and Korean Obangsaek colour principles. Elastic bands, mirrors, illuminated forms and architectural structures transform the space into a field of tension and reflection. In PERISTYLE, a penetrable structure drawing upon the visual language of Maltese festa decoration brings ritual celebration into proximity with histories of siege, conflict and collective commemoration.

From here, PONKS transforms the Glass Polygon into ROPE TEMPLE, an immersive installation of rope, poetry, light and sound. Hundreds of metres of suspended rope create a room within a room, converging into a dense, tree-like structure that emerges from the ground and rises through the space. The work brings the ritual significance of Korean Geumjul—sacred ropes traditionally associated with protection—into conversation with Malta’s maritime and religious histories of rope. Maltese and Korean poems inhabit the surrounding architecture as individual worlds, gathering within a shared space while retaining their distinct voices.

The installation continues below ground in the Base Polygon, conceived as the subterranean roots of the temple. Three interconnected spaces approach poetry through musicality, word, and worlds. Drawing on field recordings captured across Malta and South Korea, Michael Quinton creates an immersive soundscape that uses sonic manipulation, resonance, and silence to transform this underground space into a parallel sensory experience.  Alongside it, an experimental anthology of poetic contributions occupies the spaces in between. While in the adjacent room, seven 360-degree video performances from Malta and Korea extend the pavilion beyond its geographical and architectural boundaries, opening up immersive virtual spaces that transcend the physical space.

Across the pavilion, the “in-between” becomes a living threshold rather than a point of transit: somewhere identities can remain unresolved, different voices can coexist without dissolving into one another, and cultural encounter can produce new forms rather than fixed conclusions.

BEJN / IN-BETWEEN is commissioned by Arts Council Malta, under the auspices of the Ministry for Arts, Culture and National Heritage, and supported by Visit Malta and the Cultural Diplomacy Fund, managed by the Ministry for Foreign and European Affairs.