Eugenio Tibaldi is the first Italian artist to represent our country at the Malta Biennale


Eugenio Tibaldi will be the first Italian artist to represent our country at the Malta Biennale, the major new international exhibition debuting with its first edition from March 13 to May 31, 2024. Tibaldi has prepared a project that speaks of marginality and reinterprets the rhetoric about the history of the Mediterranean.

Eugenio Tibaldi (Alba, 1977) will be the first Italian artist to represent our country at the Malta Biennial, the new international art event that debuts with its first edition from March 13 to May 31, 2024, bringing together several leading artists from the international scene and projects from national pavilions. Tibaldi is the artist selected for the Italian Pavilion, where his exhibition Informal Inclusion, curated by Francesca Guerisoli and Nicolas Martino, will be held in the spaces of Villa Portelli in Kalkara. The Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art is promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity and the Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma, in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Italian Embassy in Valletta, the Italian Cultural Institute in Valletta, and is realized by Fondazione La Rocca.

With the support of Heritage Malta, Eugenio Tibaldi transforms the spaces of Villa Portelli without giving precise temporal constraints, and rather aiming to highlight the multiple dimensions of the lives that have been intertwined there over time. The installation reveals forgotten histories and sheds light on what has remained invisible, while at the same time dismantling the rhetoric that, from a limited perspective, has shaped an unambiguous narrative about Europe and the Mediterranean, helping to create hierarchical structures and relations of subordination based on power and economics.

The Informal Inclusion project explores the marginal dynamics that permeate processes of inclusion, highlighting the indefinability of our deepest desires. It focuses on the complex intertwining of economics and contemporary culture, offering an alternative view on immigration. Tibaldi, in the wake of his artistic research, starts from the concept of the margin and the untold stories related to the exploitation of the “other.” Thus emerge the intricate plots of a hidden reality, yet crucial to the economies and lives of the more affluent world. The installation explores the contrasting relationship between good and evil, highlighting the island’s tangled past and the raw violence of a world in which migratory flows reshape territorial boundaries and reawaken colonial trauma. Finally, Informal Inclusion aims to cast a critical gaze on the history and actuality of the Mediterranean, aware that the regeneration of the world depends on marginality, capable of resisting dominant narratives and contaminating the spaces it traverses.

Eugenio Tibaldi, Informal Inclusion (2024; environmental installation; Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art). Photo: Lorenzo Morandi
Eugenio Tibaldi, Informal Inclusion (2024; environmental installation; Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art). Photo: Lorenzo Morandi
Eugenio Tibaldi, Informal Inclusion (2024; environmental installation; Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art). Photo: Lorenzo Morandi
Eugenio Tibaldi, Informal Inclusion (2024; environmental installation; Italian Pavilion at maltabiennale.art). Photo: Lorenzo Morandi

Eugenio Tibaldi is an artist who has always been attracted to marginal aesthetics and the complex relationship between economy and contemporary culture. Leaving northern Italy, in 2000 he moved to the Neapolitan hinterland where he began work that investigates one of Italy’s most plastic and dynamic territories, beginning to draw a kind of map of informality. Through the study of the margin, Tibaldi’s works activate a processual dynamic that allows alternative aesthetics to emerge. In recent years he has worked in Istanbul, Naples, Cairo, Rome, Thessaloniki, Berlin, Verona, Havana, Bucharest, Turin, Caracas, Brussels, Tirana, Addis Ababa, Mumbai. His works are exhibited in public and private institutions in Italy and abroad. His solo and group exhibitions have been held in numerous spaces, including: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2007), Manifesta 7, Bolzano (2008), International Centre of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2009), Museo Madre, Naples (2010) Thessaloníki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013), XII Havana Biennale (2015), Museo Ettore Fico, Turin (2016), Palazzo del Quirinale (2017), Museum MCDA Manila, (2017), IIC New York (2017). Museo MAXXI, Rome (2018), Venice Biennale, Cuba Pavilion (2019), Museo del Novecento Milan (2019), La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2020), Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Capannori, LU (2021), Pav Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (2021), Fondazione Pietro e Alberto Rossini (2023). Since 2001 he has collaborated with the Umberto Di Marino gallery.

Eugenio Tibaldi is the first Italian artist to represent our country at the Malta Biennale
Eugenio Tibaldi is the first Italian artist to represent our country at the Malta Biennale


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