Fragile Foundations
An art exhibition curated by Fabrizio Mifsud Soler
Artists: Francesca Balzan, Rebecca Bonaci, Shaun Grech, Kane Cali
Presented by the Permanent Representation of Malta to the Council of Europe & The Bored Peach Club as part of the Cultural Programme under the Maltese Presidency of the Council of Europe and the World Forum for Democracy 2025
The Details:
Lobby of the Hemicycle, Council of Europe, Strasbourg
5–14 November 2025
About
Fragile Foundations begins from a moment of uncertainty, from the tremor between creation and collapse, where everything we know is both forming and falling apart at once.
Existence moves in cycles of creation, growth, erosion, and renewal. Within this continuous motion lies the quiet tension of being human, the knowledge that endurance is never still and that stability must always be reimagined.
At its heart, the exhibition reflects on the fragile equilibrium that defines both art and democracy: a balance that relies on care, on the human capacity to rebuild what fractures, and on the persistence of meaning within uncertainty. Each act of shaping carries the trace of collapse; each act of erasure holds the seed of creation.
The four Maltese artists gathered here approach this threshold through form, touch, and transformation. Their works explore how matter and identity pass through cycles of replication and renewal. What emerges is not permanence but continuity, a living testament to resilience and the will to endure.
The Space
Space One: The Ground of Becoming
Francesca Balzan and Rebecca Bonaci
Clay and horizons converge in acts of formation and reflection. The works evoke origins, the shaping of form, the stillness before motion, the balance between human touch and elemental rhythm.
Francesca Balzan presents fifteen hand-shaped clay heads that embody creation as a primal act. Their imperfections breathe life, each indentation a record of immediacy and care. These faces, neither idealised nor abstracted, stand together as witnesses to a shared humanity that persists through difference and time.
The pastel landscapes by Rebecca Bonaci unfold as meditations on serenity and renewal. Her coiling suns and reflective horizons recall beginnings: the first mark, the first movement; where sea and sky merge in quiet equilibrium.
Space Two: The Weight of Unmaking
Shaun Grech and Kane Cali
Rupture enters the surface, colour distorts, matter fractures. In this shifting terrain, disintegration becomes a form of continuity and renewal emerges from the residue of collapse.
Shaun Grech confronts the human spirit in moments of crisis. His painted figures erupt in raw colour and emotional distortion, their forms caught between recognition and erasure. Within this turbulence lies a reflection on vulnerability, dissent, and the fragile pulse of democracy.
Kane Cali extends this rupture into the realm of material and form. His hybrid sculptures of steel, obsidian, rock, and concrete fuse the natural and the industrial, the remembered and the reconstructed. What once emerged from clay now returns as alloy and ruin, yet still insists on shape, memory, and the persistence of form.
A Meditation on Renewal
Through this dialogue between serenity and violence, Fragile Foundations becomes a meditation on resilience and the cyclical nature of existence.
In tracing the rhythm of creation and collapse, we glimpse our own humanity, fragile yet persistent, shaped again and again by the will to endure.
All Images by Melchior Giordimaina
Contact
info(@)boredpeachclub.com