A 50-year retrospective by Joe Smith is opening at the Valletta Contemporary art gallery on Friday, May 8.
Still Time proposes photography as a temporal experience: a medium where the past is continually reactivated in the present.
Smith’s work captures fleeting, often unnoticed moments; images that exist in a state of in-betweenness, neither fully past nor present, but continually reactivated through the viewer’s gaze.
Structured across four thematic strands, the exhibition traverses shifts in subject, mood and composition, while resisting fixed notions of time and place. Instead, it invites viewers into a fluid narrative − one where personal memory and collective recognition begin to overlap. In Smith’s images, stillness carries movement.
Smith received a standard academic education but on starting work with the Malta government in his late teens, he continued his studies in the arts. His main interests encompass photography, painting and the graphic media. He studied graphic design in Florence, Italy, and in 2015 he successfully read for a master’s degree in fine art, digital arts at the University of Malta.
He has had several solo exhibitions in Malta, as well as overseas. In 1991 he had a solo exhibition on theatrical photography in Moscow and this was followed by others in the UK. In 2017 he had two solo exhibitions in Brussels and China after being selected as a participating artist in the Reunion project to celebrate Malta’s presidency of the EU. He has also participated in several collectives in Malta and abroad.
Smith has been the recipient of numerous national and international awards including having five portraits selected in three editions of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2014, 2015 and 2021. In 2020 and 2022, his work was also awarded in the Portrait of Humanity Awards organised by the British Journal of Photography. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the BBA Photo Prize at BBA Gallery, Berlin.
He has also published two seminal photo documentary/anthropological volumes with the title Survivors − The Ageing Population of Birgu and is presently working on the third volume. Last year he took part in a 10-day residency at Art Print Residence in Barcelona.
The exhibition is curated by Lisa Gwen Chetcuti, who has a background in art history, cultural management, media and communications, project management and development. She has been an independent writer and curator since 2007.
Both Smith and Chetcuti will be present at the opening on Friday between 7 and 10pm. Those interested to attend are encouraged to RSVP. Entrance is free.
The exhibition runs until June 20. Valletta Contemporary is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 2 to 7pm. It is closed on public holidays.
