GROUND 99 is a Satellite Event of the Malta Biennale 2026, conceived as a dynamic platform for multidisciplinary installation, video, and performance art. Within the conceptual framework of the Malta Biennale 2026 – Clean | Clear | Cut – GROUND 99 operates as a satellite that enacts the Biennale’s call for urgent transformation. The exhibition brings together 12 international and Malta-based artists whose works confront environmental, ethical, and aesthetic pollution, exemplifying the imperative to clean by revealing the traumas and imbalances embedded in globalised societies. By foregrounding practices that interrogate ecological fragility, social inequality, and the excesses of image and information, GROUND 99 enables audiences to clear: to discern and decipher the systems of power, exploitation, and cultural sediment that shape contemporary life. The exhibition’s installations, video works, and performances also enact the principle of cut, opening new paths for reflection and action.

GROUND 99 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 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 sculptural installations by Malta-based artists Duška Malešević, Madeleine Fenwick, and the duo Rachelle & Aaron Bezzina anchor the exhibition within local perspectives. Malešević’s mirrored postcard installations serves as a reflection upon reflection, where bodies fracture, language falters, and the necessity of change – whether through action, refusal, or silence – quietly asserts itself. Fenwick’s interactive candy sculptures stage a tension between seduction and consequence, suggesting that responsibility – ecological as much as ethical – begins at the moment when comfort gives way to resistance. While through a language of balance and resistance, Rachelle & Aaron Bezzina’s pendulum installation reframes equilibrium not as resolution but as ongoing negotiation.

At the core of Ground 99 stands Doucet Donida’s installation The Confessional, housing “Dramaturgy of Desire,” an endurance performance by Gabriel D. Doucet Donida, activated 72 hours per week. Operating as a fulcrum between ethical scrutiny, spatial control, and the politics of visibility, this work examines intimacy, vulnerability, and the economies of attention that govern contemporary subjectivity. Through sustained presence and exchange, the performance exposes the tension between visibility and withdrawal, confession and resistance – mirroring the Malta Biennale’s ethical concern with what is revealed, erased, or exploited.