Turning Tables

Turning Tables is a collaborative exhibition in which sculptor Francesca Balzan and book and paper artist Glen Calleja engage with artworks from MUŻA’s reserve collection. The exhibition is an immersive experience through a number of installations meant to reframe, in playful provocation, national patrimony.

The exhibition is the final stage of a multi-year project, funded by Arts Council Malta. As part of the project, Balzan, who is known mostly for her work in clay, and Calleja, who works in paper, have been confronting their media and practices in structured workshops; a process of systematic experimentation from which their collective idiom and voice emerged.

MUŻA’s reserve collection (the collection in storage) was used as a source of inspiration, presenting to the visiting public, possibly for the first time ever, hidden objects from the National Collection. The installations present moods and approaches that disrupt common expectations about the treatment and place of objects of national importance. The exhibition is, in this respect, also about art curation and the politics of museology. Cheeky humour and provocation are the declared weapons of choice of this collaborative work.

Turning Tables references the Camerone’s former use: the dining room of the Knights of the Italian Langue where tables were once the principal feature of this room. Balzan and Calleja draw on the past, evoke it, confront it to create something new and relevant to contemporary audiences while challenging their own individual art practices. In Turning Tables disruption reigns and everyone - the artists, the artworks, the audience and the space - is asked to disturb their ordinary ways of being, looking, doing, and understanding.

Turning Tables Exhibition, Artists Francesca Balzan & Glen Calleja, 31st March - 7th May 2023, MUŻA – National Museum of Art, Valletta. Open daily (incl weekends and public holiday 10am - 6pm)