Artists Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, and Brian Schembri represent Malta in “Cunning diplomacy” at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia through November 27. Co-curated by Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip, the kinetic installation reimagines Caravaggio’s seminal altarpiece, The Beheading of St.John the Baptist. The artists bring modern viewers face to face with the tragic biblical narrative through a multidimensional expression of technology, art, and music, allowing for the reconciliation of past abuse and the reformation of humanist principles.
“What I am trying to capture is the change of state, that instant in which something is becoming something else, that energy and power that exist in the flash of absolute instability between the moments of equilibrium that are the before and the after…this is a work about continuous loss, about the impossibility of holding back, about the inexorable and unstoppable flow of all things. But it’s also about the fact that being is only revealed in vanishing, that light is an evanescent interval of darkness,” said Sassolino.
