COMMISSIONED BY ARTS COUNCIL MALTA AND BROUGHT TO LIFE BY A MULTI-NATIONAL TEAM OF ARTISTS, THE MALTA PAVILION AIMS TO CHALLENGE CONTEMPORARY SOCIETAL NORMS AND ESTABLISH DESIGN AS A MOTIVATOR OF CHANGE
In June 2025, Malta will once again be among the countries presenting at the London Design Biennale (LDB) with the installation Urna, commissioned by Arts Council Malta (ACM) and managed by its International Directorate.
The installation, commissioned by Arts Council Malta, is curated by Andrew Borg Wirth, who is working with architects and designers Anthony Bonnici, Thomas Mifsud and Tanil Raif, art director Matthew Attard Navarro, art photographer Anne Immelé and filmmaker Stephanie Sant.
The event is one of the most prominent international showcases for innovation in design and culture, bringing together design teams from over 40 nations. This year’s edition will once again be held at Somerset House, with each pavilion responding to a central curatorial theme – Surface Reflections.
This marks the second time that Malta will be represented at the LDB as part of a wider strategy that aims to support local creatives and position Maltese contemporary art and design within global networks.
“The London Design Biennale gives Maltese contemporary designers extraordinary global exposure. The first Malta Pavilion that Arts Council Malta commissioned in 2023, Urban Fabric, received widespread global media attention. Malta’s debut at this event set a high standard and created a lasting impression,” says Dr Romina Delia at ACM.
Indeed, one of the benefits that participation in the LDB brings with it is that it places local designers on the global stage, where they are noticed by the people and companies that matter worldwide. Such exposure often leads to long-term international opportunities for the local designers.
“Even during the Biennale itself, there are a lot of high-level networking events taking place within Somerset House. The unique reach of the community lays the foundation for fruitful and inspiring dialogues, exchanges and collaborations with partners from many other countries. Thousands of visitors attend the LDB each year, and the design teams are regularly featured in leading international art and design media,” Dr Delia continues.
For Malta, Urna is an opportunity to explore how rituals around death are evolving within an increasingly secular, multicultural and environmentally conscious world. This year’s installation takes on questions of cremation, memory, and material culture in the Maltese context, while expanding them to a broader cultural inquiry.
At the centre of the work is a newly-reconstituted limestone product, developed in partnership with Maltese firm Halmann Vella. The stone is intended to represent both tradition and innovation – connecting Malta’s landscape and architectural history with a more sustainable future.
“Urna is not just about aesthetics,” the team notes. “It’s about rethinking one of the defining materials of our environment and preparing for its future use.
It’s also about acknowledging the environmental consequences of traditional practices, including those associated with death and burial.”
Sustainability is central to the project, both conceptually and materially. “We are trying to create a new system which uses landscapes of extraction – the oldest form of interaction with limestone – in a new way, by maximising the potential of construction waste,” the artists say.
Yet Urna is not only a showcase of Maltese material innovation. It is also a cultural and pedagogical experiment developed by a multinational team spanning Malta, Cyprus, France, the UK and the USA.
The project in fact places a premium on cross-cultural dialogue. “The importance of integrating international thinking within such a localised concept was imperative for us,” the artists explained. “We imagine Urna to hold a universal idea relating to our humanity rather than one limited to the Maltese context.”
This approach was reinforced by a workshop organised at the University of Malta. Students were invited to explore how the core ideas of Urna – ritual, sustainability, memory – could be applied in global contexts. The workshop was co-led by Turkish-Cypriot designer Tanil Raif from Harvard Graduate School of Design, together with the curator of Urna Andrew Borg Wirth and architect Anthony Bonnici, both members of the university’s teaching staff. Their work will be documented in a book accompanying the installation.
“We were interested in situating Malta within a broader conversation,” the artists explain. “Design, here, is not ornamental. It’s a way to ask difficult questions about how we live, and how we remember.
The ultimate aim of the project is to challenge contemporary societal norms and establish design as a motivator of change. In this way, the Biennale is a great platform to showcase how the politics of the intervention is speaking of a new time; one where cremation (and not only burial) is a widespread method of bodily disposition, where the reuse of stone dust replaces less sustainable practices, where disused quarries return to our urban psyche and where the individual is significant, but not more fundamental than the whole.”
This approach, they add, relates wholeheartedly to this year’s theme of Surface Reflections. In an event which is invested in internal and external experiences, the Malta pavilion will establish itself as the negotiator between realms of the living and the dead; of the personal and public.
It seeks to use design to chart a new history not only for individuals, but as a collective within a growingly more secular, cosmopolitan and adapting Malta.
“The point of the Biennale is to find ideas that challenge the way we have existed, to propose a new way that we can live. The values of the project were derived from the overall theme, where design becomes a new embodiment for changing times,” the artists reiterate.
Malta’s participation in the Biennale forms part of ACM’s wider commitment to supporting our cultural presence on international stages. Over the past decade, it has commissioned Malta’s participation in four editions of the Venice Art Biennale and is now preparing for Malta’s debut at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2026.
“Malta’s participation at previous Biennale events were an all-round success, and they have paved the way for our participation in similar events out of Europe. Our strategy is shifting toward long-term engagement models, supporting our artists in continuing to build the trust and understanding this world needs so much these days,” Dr Delia states.
For the Gwangju Biennale ACM is also planning an artistic residency to go with the exhibition process, placing the focus on co-creation, sustained dialogue and being present within communities.
“This approach reflects a move away from one-off international presentations and toward longer, more reciprocal collaborations,” she concludes.
URNA is the Malta Pavilion at London Design Biennale commissioned by Arts Council Malta and made possible through support from Halmann Vella, Gasan Foundation, Embassy of France in Malta, Malta Enterprise, Deloitte Foundation, Visit Malta, KM Malta Airlines and all other partners.
Credits:
URNA – Courtesy Anne Immelé
URNA, Renders. Courtesy of URNA, Malta
URNA, Thomas Mifsud. Courtesy of URNA, Malta
