​2026 - IN TIME

XII edition

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The 2026 edition, titled IN TIME, continues Flashback's research into time, not as a linear succession of eras, but as an open dimension in which past, present and future coexist and contaminate one another.

For Flashback, indeed, every work of art always speaks in the present in its encounter with the viewer. To be in time therefore means to be within one's own time, but also to move across all times, building unexpected connections between images, stories and experiences.

The Journey and the Sail

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From this perspective, the journey becomes the metaphor that guides the entire edition. Not a route with a predetermined destination, but a crossing in which finding one's direction means reading the present, welcoming the unexpected and continually altering one's course.

The sailing boat embodies this condition perfectly: it advances thanks to the wind, the currents and the ability to interpret what happens, turning uncertainty into possibility. Navigation has always accompanied the human experience.

It is the symbol of crossing, of knowledge, of the desire for freedom and of the search for new landfalls.

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Today in Piazza Bottesini

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The first billboard is the work Follow the Ship(s) – Drawing Detail #2 by Matthew Attard, part of the project I Will Follow the Ship presented by the artist at the Malta Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Attard draws inspiration from the ship graffiti carved by sailors and pilgrims in the churches of Malta: ex-votos, marks left by those who entrusted their hopes and requests for protection to the sea. The title holds, implicitly, an invitation that is also a hint at the work's method of creation: follow the ships.

The drawing, in fact, does not arise from the movement of the hand, but from an eye-tracking system that records the movement of the artist's eyes as he follows the contours of the engravings. Into these traces are woven digital images of the sea and the routes of ships.

Thus the ancient graffito and the digital mark, past and present, merge into a new image. The technique changes, but not the function: today as then, that drawing entrusts a hope of salvation to the sea.

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Matthew Attard (Malta, 1987) is a visual artist and lecturer at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta.

He represented the Malta Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project I WILL FOLLOW THE SHIP, commissioned by the Malta Arts Council and co-curated by Elyse Tonna and Sara Dolfi Agostini. His artistic practice investigates images as social and cultural constructs. His work sits within the field of contemporary drawing through a multimedia approach that highlights its versatile, performative and temporal nature. Central to his research is the idea of the gaze as a form of drawing, in its perceptual, physiological and cultural dimensions - a theme also developed during his practice-based doctorate at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, funded by the Malta Arts Scholarship programme.

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His first exhibition was a two-person show organised in 2014 at Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice. Since then he has presented his work in Venice, Rome, Valletta, Genoa, London, Beijing and Los Angeles, among other cities. In 2018 he received the Under 30 Euromobil Prize at Arte Fiera in Bologna. He was also selected for three editions of Ten Artists to Watch at the Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts (LACDA) and, in 2019, invited to take part in Artissima Telephone in the spaces of the OGR in Turin. In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and presented one of his main solo exhibitions, Rajt ma rajtx... naf li rajt, curated by Elyse Tonna at Valletta Contemporary. In 2022 he was commissioned to create the work Here's How I Did Not See What You Wanted Me To See as part of the OPEN digital residency at Blitz in Valletta, curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. In 2023 he held the solo exhibition Ship of Fools at Galleria Michela Rizzo in Venice. In 2024 he represented the Malta Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

In 2025 he presented Segni di rotta at the same gallery and won the Best International Achievement Award from the Malta Arts Council for I WILL FOLLOW THE SHIP; in October of the same year he inaugurated The Ship (Unseen), curated by Elyse Tonna, at the Inquisitor's Palace in Birgu, Malta.