Together with R Gallery and in collaboration with the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, Borg Wirth’s efforts are directed towards the confrontation of this delay—not as a passive lapse, but as a deliberate erosion of truth, care and collective memory. “This curatorial project resists the idea that time heals all wounds. Some wounds deepen in the absence of justice,” said Borg Wirth.
The collaboration is part of the Foundation’s advocacy for justice and R Gallery’s commitment to support political and activist art in Malta. With Creative Director Kathrine Maj, Project Managers Tina Urso and Michaela Pia Camilleri, and design by Tracey Sammut, Tabling Emotion brings together the voices of seven artists and seven cases of homicide in Malta—each unresolved, each suspended in bureaucratic inertia.
The title itself carries a double edge: ‘tabling’ both as the formal act of parliamentary presentation and the metaphorical gesture of laying bare what has long been buried. In this installation, the table is a battleground of memory and mourning, where grief is not allowed closure, where emotions persist as continual confrontation. “If at the heart of justice, there lie people, then at the heart of injustice, there lies neglect,” continues Borg Wirth. The tone is neither sentimental nor abstract. It is precise, political, unflinching.
Through a range of media—sculpture, painting, photography, typewritten text, scent—each artist draws from a different well of emotional and civic resistance.
Adrian Abela uses breath and scent to evoke justice as a shared, living ecology—fragile, permeable, in need of tending. Bettina Hutschek collages bureaucratic language into poetic fragments, dismantling the official narratives that disguise delay as due process. Sebastian Tanti Burlò, known for his acerbic cartoons in the Times of Malta, turns satire into elegy, notably invoking the laurel as a symbol of remembrance for slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Painter Ġulja Holland channels myth and symbolism to reflect on Malta’s crises of political and ecological stewardship, while Joanna Demarco captures the face of waiting itself, documenting Amara Kromah’s years-long quest for justice through her stark style of photography. Marlon Tabone builds an evolving installation from archival fragments, reflecting the erosion of memory over time. Sonia Lenzi reclaims public space by inserting forgotten women into Malta’s landscape, proposing an alternate form of monument—quiet, resistant, female.
Co-funded by the European Union, this project is both local and continental in its resonance. Malta is its focal point, but the questions posed—Who is accountable when systems fail? What happens when justice never arrives?—speak across borders.
Tabling Emotion does not seek to offer comfort, but rather confrontation. It asks us to dwell in the uncomfortable silence between loss and legal closure. It positions art as an act of radical empathy and political insistence, reminding us that justice is not only a courtroom outcome, it is also the courage to feel, remember and refuse to forget.
Tabling Emotion runs from July 24 – August 28 at R Gallery, 26 Tigne Street, Sliema
The exhibition is presented by The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation x R Gallery. It has been co-Funded by the European Union.
