Pandemic: Survival, Art and New Action is a collective exhibition that investigates the contemporary phenomenon affecting our lives today. By bringing together this wealth of artistic experiences, we are inviting people to transcend the mundane pandemic dynamics and acknowledge the call for change that it brings with it.

The name of the exhibition captures its essence because the word Art actually sits between Survival and New Action – the former implying a passivity and reticence to live the uncertainty day by day whilst the latter pushes us to adapt through action and a new vision. In the inaction implied by Survival there is a desire for a projection into the unknown. Somewhere along this trajectory lies the production of art.

A number of artists and their work are being exhibited both in the atrium at Malta Enterprise and on this digital platform.  An extensive selection of visual art processes including photography, digital art, painting, drawing, etching, woodcut & lino print to ceramic & bronze sculpture, work cohesively to tell a story, one that narrates the need to live through this reality and create artworks that are a testimony to this very peculiar turn of 21st century events.

RIDT – Art for research’s sake

This unique art exhibition talks about survival, about resiliance and about hope. Until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we rarely used these three words together in the same sentence. But in a matter of a few months the whole world changed before our very eyes and we have been rendered speechless and vulnerable in the light of a new reality. This exhibition is the language with which artists are communicating what we’ve been through and what are our survival paths. This exhibition is about art supporting science which in turn provides us with solutions for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.

The Research Trust (RIDT) of the University of Malta is committed to support research through the attraction of funds from the community. Since its setting up in 2011, we have managed to raise more than €4 million, most of which have been going towards the financing of PhD scholarships in areas such as cancer, ALS and diabetes, and other non-medical subjects such as climate change and criminology. The RIDT has also raised funds by means of which the Faculty of Dental Surgery today has its own Mobile Dental Clinic, which apart from reaching out to the community offering dental services, has been fundamental in our country’s vaccination programme.

Thank you for visiting this exhibition and for your support to help us raise funds to sustain research at the University of Malta. And thank you Malta Enterprise for your strong social commitment.