![\"Nina](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ff1b4da8654781e6406a901d49fe0fd9e982cb61-1775828814-737d1daa-1920x1280.jpg\" "\\"Nina")
Nina Gerada and Ann Dingli. Photos: Lisa Attard<\/p>\nArtist Nina Gerada will discuss work she developed over the past 20 years in a conversation to be held next week.<\/p>\n
Gerada\u2019s work for the Malta Biennale 2026, which is on show at the Citadella in Gozo until May 29, explores what the artist describes as \u201cthe profound, reciprocal relationship between a person and their native landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n
She will discuss that work in a conversation with writer Ann Dingli titled No Other Mother Land, taking place on April 16 at St Catherine of Italy\u2019s Church, Valletta.<\/p>\n
The talk will engage themes of exile and belonging.<\/p>\n
\u201cI moved to London when I was 19, a year before Malta joined the EU. I returned 22 years later, and this homecoming has become central to my practice,\u201d Gerada said.<\/p>\n
I left as a teenager and returned as a mother, at the threshold of middle age. It was a time of rapid change for Malta and my work struggles with this \u2013 expressing loss, hope, and the deep spiritual connection I feel for the islands.\u201d<\/p>\n
This tension – between connection and disconnection, departure and return – runs throughout her work, shaped by what she describes as having \u201cno other mother land\u201d.<\/p>\n
Through walking, drawing, sculpting, and photography, Gerada connects figurative, geological, and makeshift references. Her practice is grounded in time, attention, and care: walking the coastline as a way of inhabiting and gently reclaiming common land, while documenting and reflecting on its ongoing transformation.<\/p>\n
Writer Ann Dingli first encountered Gerada\u2019s work after also having left Malta, writing about her sculptures from a temporary home in New York. She is now based in London, where she works as an art and architecture writer, editor and curator.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who has a fraught, passionate, difficult, aching, eternally morphing relationship with their native country will resonate with Nina\u2019s work \u2013 and hopefully our conversation around it,\u201d Dingli said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are all born somewhere, and in a world beleaguered by the contrast between \u2018ownership\u2019, which can be forced, and \u2018belonging\u2019, which cannot, the intimate and enduring power of the Motherland has to be discussed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nina Gerada and Ann Dingli. Photos: Lisa Attard<\/p>\n
Their conversation will reflect on the perception of place through mapping, and on the corporeal and ancestral ties between people and the geology of where they come from. It will also touch on Gerada\u2019s exploration of the female form, developed in her earlier Biennale work The Goddess Project, shown in 2024 at the Grandmaster\u2019s Palace in Valletta.<\/p>\n
Set within a heritage site resonant with collective identity, No Other Mother Land will bring together questions of the evolving definition of home. The conversation approaches belonging as both a personal and universal condition, foregrounding the enduring connection between body and land.<\/p>\n