Our Art Exhibition for Malta 2025
The Malta 2025 Art Exhibition brings together diverse artistic voices to explore identity, inclusion, and social change through creative expression.
Set in a space of dialogue and reflection, the exhibition highlights how art can challenge perspectives, amplify underrepresented voices, and foster meaningful connection.
"WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO CARRY A PART OF YOURSELF QUIETLY, EVERY DAY, JUST TO FEEL SAFE OR ACCEPTED AT WORK?
Meet our Artists
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SERGIO BONILLA PINZÓN
ARTIST
Sergio Bonilla Pinzón (b. 1991, Bogotá) is a Colombian visual artist based in Paris. Working primarily in drawing and painting, his practice explores queer embodiment, poetic resistance, and subversive beauty within normative systems.A graduate of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Paris 8 University’s contemporary art program, Bonilla has exhibited across Europe and Latin America. His work reimagines masculinities through sensuality, irony, and visual tension, often blending tenderness and rebellion in the same gesture.
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MARÍA GABRIELA HERRERA GONZÁLEZ
ARTIST
María Herrera (Gabysh) is from Veraguas, Panama and Architect graduated from the University of Panama, but with a passion for the arts, the research and teaching. As an artist, watercolor techniues are the one she exercises the most, although she also develops digital works and collages, focused on the mixture of different cultures, customs and traditions.
This has led her to participate in different collective art exhibitions and competitions, the most recent being: Second Place in the Roberto Lewis Contest, Digital Art category with the Work: The Apparition. (2022), Collective Poster Exhibition of 120 Years of Relationship between Panama and Mexico, (2024), she has also been a curator in the first exhibition I Exist Too, Invisibles (2023).
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THOMAS VAN GAALEN
ARTIST
Thomas van Gaalen is an illustrator and a PhD candidate in history at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on practices of solidarity in the interwar Caribbean. As an illustrator and designer, Thomas has produced, among other things, book covers, cover artwork for musical releases, and promotional materials for non-profit-causes and social movements. Currently, he is the art director and chief illustrator of the Dutch edition of Jacobin Magazine.
Website: https://thomasvangaalen.format.com/
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MATTHEW SCHEMBRI
ARTIST
Matthew Schembri (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist, writer and poet based in Malta. He earned a
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Digital Arts in 2017. Schembri won Divergent Thinkers 04 (2015), and Shifting Contexts (2019), and was named The Young Artist of the Year in 2017 by Arts
Council Malta. In addition to Malta, he exhibited his works and was awarded art and literary
residencies in the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Croatia and Finland.Schembri’s debut novel, Stessi (2018), won The Literary Contest of Novels for Youth 2016. With
his first poetry collection, Ħassartek (2021), he received the Best Emerging Author award from the National Book Council Malta in 2022. His work was
translated into English, French, and Croatian
THE ARTWORK
High Tide, Pulsing Desires - Sergio Bonilla Pinzón
In the dim solitude of his cabin, he leans into the porthole — that perfect circle of salt and longing. The sea outside is alive, swelling and curling like a forbidden thought. Inside, the sailor is still. Bonilla’s High Tide, Pulsing Desires captures the moment where queer intimacy is not enacted, but remembered and dreamt. Around him, tokens of a secret world gather like relics: Querelle, Notre-Dame des Fleurs, a standing object of pleasure resting next to unread books. These are not props — they are traces of life. The sailor’s gaze is half closed, not from sleep but from reverie. His mouth swollen, his posture relaxed, his body becomes a coastline of quiet arousal. In this room, where walls are thin and rules thick, he survives by dreaming through desire.
The Strongest Ones Don’t Cry - María Herrera (Gabysh)
Suppressing feelings for being different, for not being part of the supposed normal, leads to a point where those feelings overflow and can drown us.
Zebra Cross - Matthew Schembri
This projection presents a poem titled after its subject, a zebra crossing, which is also reflected in its colour and form. It was translated into English by Jake Buttigieg, and it will be published soon
Under Tension - Sergio Bonilla Pinzón
Two workers hold a cable taut between their bodies. Muscles strained, shoulders squared, the men exist in an economy of effort — but their tension is not just mechanical. There’s a gesture in the eyes, a rhythm in the hands, a softness in the hips that betrays something deeper: desire repressed, coded, undetected by those who refuse to see it. In Under Tension, Bonilla reimagines the mythic iconography of the working man. Suspended above an abstracted cityscape, these figures inhabit a liminal space between labor and longing. The drawing plays with exaggeration — bulging forearms, swollen jaws, eyes too aware — to break open the image of virility and expose its cracks. This is not simply a scene of effort. It’s a dance of constraint. The cable they hold becomes a metaphor: for restraint, for connection, for what is held but never spoken. There is eroticism in the silence, power in the posture, and a quiet act of defiance in every smirk and curve.
Discipline - Sergio Bonilla Pinzón
A young cadet clutches his sword with militant resolve, but his face betrays another truth. Lips too full, eyes lined with quiet defiance, earrings glinting under the barracks light — this is a soldier of another kind. Behind him, a grotesque rooster hovers like a fever dream: a symbol of power, of virility, and also, of ridicule. In Discipline, Bonilla dismantles the austere image of the military body. Here, uniform becomes costume, posture becomes performance, and masculinity is both weapon and mask. There is tension in this boy’s stance — not from fear, but from containment. The blade he holds is not for combat but control. And the cockerel, that absurd guardian, looms as a reminder that every order has its echo, every rule its kink.
Barrier - María Herrera (Gabysh)
Being different creates walls that are difficult to break down. For this piece, Herrera interviewed a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and within their experiences, they told her that despite not feeling ashamed of their orientation, they tried to hide it in their work environment to avoid causing problems at work, as many people have prejudiced attitudes toward people from the community. Over the years, this person created a kind of imaginary barrier that made them feel they couldn’t fully converse with their coworkers for fear that if they found out about their sexual orientation, they would change their attitude toward them or even diminish their work. This piece attempts to show that feeling of not feeling part of the team at work or anywhere else, because they are afraid to talk about themselves or express their feelings.
Untitled - Thomas Van Gaalen
Employing a combination of ink drawing and digital coloring, the design depicts attempts to render visible human experiences that are often ignored, silenced and denied within the maritime industry. Emphasizing the aims of I Exist Too, the image showcases a lens that cuts through the blocked light of the ship's dark silhouette, filtering out the color and vibrance hidden beneath the shape of this maritime vessel.
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