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Memorial ImmortalA solo exhibition by Sergio Muscat
Curated by Sue Falzon
Exhibition Opening: 12th December | 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Exhibition Dates:
12th December – 24th December 2025
7th January – 28th February 2026
Wednesday - Saturday | 2pm - 7pm (closed public holidays)
(Valletta Contemporary is shutdown between 25th December till 6th January)
Entrance is free
VALLETTA CONTEMPORARY
15, 16, 17, East Street, Valletta
Supported by
FBIC Farsons & Ta’ Dirjanu
Intervisions, PhotoINK, Snap & Print
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The Exhibition
Memorial Immortal is an introspective meditation on what lingers after a life has passed. Drawing from an autobiographical archive of photographs, the work explores how images, and the systems we build around them, persist, evolve, and continue to transform beyond our presence.
These works transcend photography as static moments preserved; they are rather memories in motion. Through a semi-automated process, images dissolve into colour, light, and shape, only to be recombined again and again. Each iteration becomes both source and outcome, forming an evolving archive that quietly embodies a symbolic immortality.
The project contacts legacy not as a monument to be fixed in time, but as the subtle ripples of lived experience: choices, errors, and accidents that accumulate and transform over time. What endures is not a single, frozen image, but a flow of derivatives that carry traces of what came before while reaching toward what is yet to emerge. In this ongoing process, the work reflects life itself: derivatives that echo the past in unexpected ways, carrying traces of what has been while moving into forms we cannot predict.
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The Artist
Sergio Muscat (b. 1978, Malta) is an artist working between photography, code and abstraction. With a background in computer science and a Master’s in Digital Art, he treats images as raw material in evolving, system-driven processes rather than fixed endpoints.
His practice centres on memory, legacy and symbolic immortality, using custom software to deconstruct and recombine a lifelong photographic archive into new, layered abstractions. Muscat describes this as “automatistic co-curation”, where human judgment and algorithmic chance continually negotiate authorship. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in Malta and abroad and lives and works on the island of Gozo.
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The Curator
Sue Falzon works in education, management, and Gestalt psychotherapy, shaped by a lifelong sensitivity to how humans create meaning. She understands meaning not as something found or interpreted, but as an experience that emerges through our contact with the world – something felt and continually shaped.
For Sue, art and aesthetics are essential to this process. Art offers a way to connect, to come into contact with ourselves and others, and to access the parts of life that deepen healing, creativity, and vitality. In her curatorial experiences, she sees art as a space where individuals and communities can reawaken imagination and a fuller sense of aliveness. Through this lens, art becomes a sustaining force, enriching personal experience and nurturing a more creative, responsive society.
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Curatorial Statement - Sue Falzon
There are fleeting moments when an encounter quietly rearranges something inside you. My meeting with Memorial Immortal was one of these transitional moments, a moment when abstraction shifted from something distant into something I could finally feel. For so long, I approached abstract work searching for clues or meanings, hoping the image would tell me what it meant. But standing with Sergio’s work, I realised that meaning is not something waiting to be uncovered. It arises in the space between us and the image, in the subtle movements of sensation that awaken when we allow ourselves to be present.
As a Gestalt psychotherapist, I know how deeply human it is to try to control life: to fix, stabilise, and push away the discomfort of the unknown. Uncertainty can feel like a threat, and we tighten around it. Yet this work invited me into a different rhythm: one of loosening, softening, letting experience unfold and just staying with it. In this space, uncertainty became less something to endure and more something to explore. And within that exploration, there was a gentle shift: from managing life to becoming curious about it. This is the quiet gift of art: it allows us to meet the world with a more open heart.
Sergio’s process of Photoclasm – the breaking open of photographs into colour, light and form – deepened this shift for me. These images echo the way life unfolds: nothing remains fixed, yet nothing is ever fully lost. Each work carries traces of what came before while reaching toward what has not yet arrived. Watching this process, I saw the human story reflected back; the way we gather ourselves, break apart, reorganise, and keep becoming. We are all derivatives of our own history, yet always moving into new form.
And then, within the exhibition, lies the central figure, a quiet pulse of continual change. It moves like breath, like weather through the sky, like a self in motion. Forms appear, dissolve and reform, reminding us that transition is not disruption but the natural rhythm of living. In its flow, I recognised something of my own inner life, the way certain encounters continue to move within me long after their initial moment. This shifting sequence is not a narrative; it is an experience, a field of presence. It holds a tenderness that asks nothing except that you allow it to unfold.
When you visit this exhibition space, I invite you not to search for answers but to allow this body of work to reach you in its own way. Let the colours breathe. Let the transitions move through you. Notice what stirs, what settles, what resists, what opens. The meaning is not hidden inside the art, it comes alive within you. Memorial Immortal is an invitation to feel rather than interpret, to meet the work with the same openness with which life asks to be met. Perhaps, like me, you may discover that art becomes not something to understand, but something to live and that meanings are always our co-creation.
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Artist’s Statement - Sergio Muscat
I have been thinking about legacy for as long as I can remember. At some point I realised I was unlikely to become a father, and the question of what would remain of my life beyond my lifetime stopped being abstract. Robert Jay Lifton speaks of “symbolic immortality”: the ways we continue through nature, creativity, experience, belief. I have quietly abandoned some of those paths, but the natural, creative and experiential modes have shaped most of my adult life.
Photography was my way into that quandary. At first it was simple: make images so I could remember. I photographed with the precision of an architect – controlled, monochrome, technically immaculate. Over time, though, the photographs stopped feeling like endings and started to feel like beginnings. They became fragments of something larger: patterns, colours, contrasts, pieces of an unknown future puzzle. I began to see my archive as an “autobiography in images”; a record not only of where I had been, but of what could still be made from it.
The Memorial Immortal project is born of this shift. It asks what happens when you submit that entire autobiography to a process that can, in principle, outlive you. I use the term Photoclasm to describe what I do: breaking down photographs into their core elements – colour, light, shape – and recombining them into new, evolving abstractions. At first, I did this manually in series like DreamChaser and Memoirs. Eventually, my background in technology made the obvious question unavoidable: what if this could continue without me?
I wrote software to perform those transformations under constraints I defined. The system generates single-image abstractions, layers them, and then keeps going – indefinitely. At each step I can intervene, accept, reject, adjust, or simply let it run. I think of this as a kind of automatistic co-curation: the machine proposes; I notice, respond, and take responsibility for what enters the world. The code reflects my choices and biases, but it also surprises me. Chance, without judgment, is noise. Chance, with judgment, becomes meaning.
The work loops: output is folded back into the archive as new input. Over time, the number of derivatives will exceed the original photographs. This feels true to life. We try to discard “failed” images, unflattering moments, regretted decisions. Here, nothing is thrown away. Every wrong exposure, every banal snapshot, every misstep becomes potential material. My past is not erased; it is constantly re-written.
Underlying all this is a simple, uncomfortable fact: everything changes. Heraclitus’s river, Warhol’s blunt reminder that “you have to change things yourself” – these phrases have stayed with me. I moved from a practice obsessed with control to one that deliberately invites uncertainty, both technically and personally. The work is not a monument to a fixed self. It is a living system that records my willingness to change, to relinquish, to trust that meaning can emerge from processes I do not fully command.
This exhibition is a snapshot of my own “here and now”: a set of images and flows that will become someone else’s memory of me. Even as we are here, though, the project, as life, continues to evolve. Legacy, as I have come to understand it, is not a goal to be engineered. It is a byproduct of how we live, the ripples our actions create in others. This project is my way of making those ripples visible.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
15,16,17 Triq Lvant (East Street), VLT1253 Valletta, Malta, 17 Triq il-Lvant, Valletta, VLT, Malta
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
