GROUND 99 is a Satellite Event of the Malta Biennale 2026, conceived as a dynamic platform for multidisciplinary installation, video, and performance art that responds directly to the Biennale’s curatorial call to clean, clear, cut. Operating within this conceptual framework, Ground 99 brings together international and Malta-based artists to confront the environmental, ethical, and aesthetic pollutions embedded in contemporary life.

Situated within the dense historical fabric of Senglea (L-Isla), Ground 99 positions contemporary artistic practice in dialogue with a site shaped by centuries of movement, defense, trade, and survival. This context is not merely a backdrop but an active participant – its narrow streets, layered histories, and proximity to the sea echo the exhibition’s concerns with fragility, exposure, and resilience. In alignment with the Biennale’s ambition to interrogate systems of accumulation and excess, Ground 99 invites both artists and audiences to slow down, to look more carefully, and to consider how we might inhabit the world otherwise.

Bringing together 12 international and Malta-based artists, the exhibition unfolds across three interlinked zones, each proposing a different mode of encounter while remaining linked conceptually. Across installation, video, and live performance, images, gestures, and spatial interventions become instruments for interrogating how meaning is produced, distorted, or erased in an era defined by acceleration, over-visibility, and excess.

The permanent exhibition foregrounds material processes that carry memory, labor, and time. Margret Eicher presents large-scale Jacquard tapestries that fuse pop-cultural and historic imagery, collapsing distinctions between high and low, past and present, to question cultural memory and mediated realities. Luis Carrera-Maul contributes sculptural paintings in porcelain and on canvas that register climate change as both material transformation and slow violence – surfaces fracture, warp, and bear the marks of environmental instability. Newly commissioned works by Malta-based artists Duška Malešević, Madeleine Fenwick, and the duo Rachelle & Aaron Bezzina anchor the exhibition within local perspectives, addressing questions of place, identity, and the pressures of development and gentrification from within lived experience.