Art from Elsewhere is a series of site-specific travelling exhibitions reframing the MOMENTUM Collection in relation to global urgencies and local contexts. Launched in 2021, to mark MOMENTUM’s 10th anniversary, it has taken place in Germany, Korea, Uzbekistan, Serbia, and Mexico. Each edition takes on a new unique form, developed in partnership with the host institutions, but always anchored in the conviction that moving images move us, and that artworks remain indispensable as windows onto the world. For its sixth edition, Art from Elsewhere comes to Malta – presented in partnership with Valletta Contemporary as part of MOMENTUM’s 15th Anniversary Program. Entitled DEEP THROAT, this edition fixes its gaze on the obscene performance of geopolitics. At the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Malta’s layered histories, shaped by centuries of geopolitical struggles, secrecy, and contradictions, make it an especially resonant site for this new chapter in MOMENTUM’s Art from Elsewhere exhibition series.

As we approach the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century of human history, we should really know better by now. Yet war, disease, and inequality continue to run rampant, despite all the great advances in human knowledge, science, and technology. We now live in a world paradoxically exceeding itself – in an age of “post-everything”: post-modern, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-digital, post-pandemic, marching inexorably towards the post-human. We are losing our humanity in a world ever more distorted by the obscene theatre of geopolitics – a crude spectacle of power, propaganda, corruption, and control that plays out daily across our screens like a grotesque form of entertainment. Art from Elsewhere: DEEP THROAT confronts this state of affairs by reframing the MOMENTUM Collection in dialogue with Maltese artists, as a lens through which to examine how art first foresaw, and now reflects, resists, and refracts the obscenity of geopolitics that dominates the global stage. In the pervasive cycle of exhibitionism and voyeurism which drives our popular culture today, perhaps it is only art which will help us hold on to our humanity.

The title DEEP THROAT exploits a deliberately gaudy double-edged metaphor for geopolitics as obscene spectacle. On the one hand, it recalls the infamous 1972 porn film – a cultural landmark in the mainstreaming of pornography, where x-rated exposure became popular entertainment. On the other, it invokes the codename of the anonymous informant who exposed the Watergate scandal in 1974, a figure whose whispered revelations toppled the Nixon presidency. Between pornographic exposure and political disclosure, Deep Throat names the contradictions of our current condition: a world increasingly hostile to surveillance and state secrecy, even as politicians and publics alike voluntarily bare their private lives on social media. We distrust surveillance yet surrender our privacy willingly; we decry intrusion even as we compulsively perform our lives for clicks, likes, and followers. Likewise, where power once operated behind closed doors, today it performs itself in full frontal view – lurid and relentlessly sensationalized. World leaders strut, rant, and overshare like influencers, states stage-manage leaks like marketing campaigns, news is fake while TV is reality, and the public scrolls endlessly between catastrophe and confession. Globally, governance has mutated into a grotesque double act: a striptease of truth and a peepshow of corruption, where secrecy and exposure collapse into the same obscene performance – politics endlessly rehearsing its own undoing, while the rest of us can’t look away. Like porn, politics and popular culture get off on being watched.

If earlier editions of Art from Elsewhere sought to provide windows onto the world – this edition confronts the impossibility of looking away. The screens that once connected us to elsewhere now overwhelm us with images of war, displacement, exploitation, and the weaponization of truth itself. This is a visual economy where information, like desire, is commodified, distorted, and consumed at speed – an obscene circulation of images that blurs the boundaries between politics, pornography, and spectacle. From wars broadcast in real time to the commodification of crisis and catastrophe, we are compelled to swallow a ceaseless stream of images that reduce human suffering to consumable entertainment.