Artist: Vince Briffa

Artworks

Vince Briffa, AMEN : NEMMEN, photo courtesy of Nina Musumeci
Vince Briffa, AMEN : NEMMEN, photo courtesy of Nina Musumeci
Vince Briffa, AMEN : NEMMEN

Articles & Reviews

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AMEN : NEMMEN — The Discipline of Listening

The opening of AMEN : NEMMEN, Vince Briffa’s installation on faith and belief, fell on the first rain of the year, closing out a hundred-and-twenty-day drought and the first completely dry Maltese summer in six years. I had not yet met the island’s infamous heat, and on September 14th, as if the island had been holding its breath, the grip finally let go. The narrow stone bridge into Fort St Elmo and the Chapel of St Anne, the exhibition’s site, act as a conduit through time, folding centuries and space into a single, intimate passage of entry. Fort St Elmo’s honey-hued limestone stood monumental, solemn, and unbothered in the late-summer light, the kind of backdrop that makes an installation about faith feel almost inevitable.

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How Malta Biennale 2026 Reimagines Site-Specificity

One is never prepared for the Maltese archipelago and its vertiginous dichotomy of antiquity and modernity; an exhilarating compound of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Though one might consider it diminutive, during the three-day press preview, I traversed the main island, Malta, and its quieter, more pastoral and bucolic sister island, Gozo, in a flurry of taxis, ferries, and buses. (Comino, a nature lover’s sanctuary, remains largely uninhabited.) Malta occupies a distinctly liminal position within the Mediterranean world: a central island shaped across centuries by exchanges among Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Situated a mere 60 miles south of Sicily and roughly an hour’s flight from Tunis, it has long functioned as a site of passage, encounter, and cultural layering—a geographic palimpsest upon which successive civilizations have inscribed themselves again and again.