Beyond the Bastions
| Date | 2025–2026 |
|---|---|
| Client | MICAS |
| Value | n.a. |
| Location | Valletta, Malta |
Commissioned by the Malta International Contemporary Art Space (MICAS) as part of its public, curatorial, and educational programme, Beyond the Bastions explores the historical evolution of the site that now hosts Malta’s national contemporary art museum. Originally conceived in the seventeenth century as an extension of the landward fortifications of Valletta, designed by the military engineer Pietro Floriani, and later adapted during the British period, the site is characterised by a complex fortified landscape of bastions, ditches, traverses, and interconnected pathways carved into and across the terrain. The exhibition provides a contextual reading of these layered transformations, situating MICAS within the long historical trajectory of the site’s military, architectural, and cultural uses.
Developed under the direction of MICAS and realised in collaboration with IPO Studio and the Restoration Directorate, the exhibition forms part of the museum’s broader intention to contextualise the new galleries for the public and to reflect on how contemporary museums might evolve in their approaches to collection-building, exhibition-making, and education. AP Valletta’s Konrad Buhagiar's role within this framework was to curate the exhibition in response to this brief. The project stands as both a tribute to the historical and architectural context of MICAS and a proposition articulated by the museum itself for the evolving nature of contemporary art spaces, embedded within a protected historic landscape.
As part of the same museum-led commission, MICAS also initiated the design of a new exhibition table system to form part of the museum’s permanent exhibition infrastructure and to support future programming. The brief, called for a solution that could operate across multiple exhibition contexts—robust yet flexible, generic yet responsive to the specific spatial conditions of the galleries. In response to this brief, AP Valletta developed a modular table system.
