GROUND 99

GROUND 99 is a Satellite Event of the Malta Biennale 2026, conceived as a dynamic platform for multidisciplinary installation, video, and performance art. Within the conceptual framework of the Malta Biennale 2026 – Clean | Clear | Cut – GROUND 99 operates as a satellite that enacts the Biennale’s call for urgent transformation. The exhibition brings together 12 international and Malta-based artists whose works confront environmental, ethical, and aesthetic pollution, exemplifying the imperative to clean by revealing the traumas and imbalances embedded in globalised societies. By foregrounding practices that interrogate ecological fragility, social inequality, and the excesses of image and information, GROUND 99 enables audiences to clear: to discern and decipher the systems of power, exploitation, and cultural sediment that shape contemporary life. The exhibition’s installations, video works, and performances also enact the principle of cut, opening new paths for reflection and action. The Video Program of GROUND 99 brings together time-based works by Bjørn Melhus, Nina E. Schönefeld, Tracey Moffatt, Almagul Menlibayeva, and Stefano Cagol. Shifting every three weeks, the program unfolds as a cinematic constellation that examines how contemporary realities are shaped through media narratives, historical memory, and ecological crisis. Working across satire, speculative fiction, mythic symbolism, and elemental performance, these artists interrogate the systems of image production and storytelling that structure how we understand the present. Bjørn Melhus dissects the myths of mass media through darkly humorous video performances in which he embodies multiple characters drawn from film and television, exposing the ideological scripts embedded in popular culture. Nina E. Schönefeld similarly appropriates cinematic spectacle, but redirects the aesthetics of science fiction toward dystopian futures that feel unsettlingly close to the present, stripping away the seductive surface of consumer culture to reveal how ecological collapse, surveillance, and authoritarian impulses have already permeated everyday life. Tracey Moffatt turns the machinery of Hollywood against itself, assembling rapid-fire montages of disaster and otherness that expose how fear and fascination are endlessly reproduced as entertainment. All three artists reveal how the images that saturate everyday life also shape collective memory, political imagination, and our capacity to perceive the crises unfolding around us. They expose the thin boundary between entertainment and ideology. What once appeared as fiction begins to read as prophecy. In contrast, Almagul Menlibayeva approaches environmental crisis through folklore, ritual, and cultural memory, presenting landscapes as living archives where geopolitcs, belief, and ancestral knowledge intersect. Stefano Cagol introduces an elemental register through solitary performances staged in fragile environments, where the recurring image of a burning flare becomes both warning signal and ritual cleansing gesture in the face of accelerating climate collapse. Together, these works extend GROUND 99’s inquiry into the environmental and informational excess that defines contemporary life. In dialogue with the Malta Biennale’s call to clean, clear, cut, the program dismantles familiar visual languages to reveal the ideological, ecological, and historical forces that shape the present - inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and reconsider the narratives through which we imagine the future. – Rachel Rits-Volloch & Gabriel D. Doucet Donida