Chap( ə)l

10 & zero uno in Venice is pleased to present CHap(ə)l, a solo exhibition by Austin Camilleri, on view from September 4 to October 24, 2026, accompanied by a critical text by Lucia Longhi.

Through a body of works spanning sculpture, drawing and interventions on pre-existing materials, the exhibition develops a reflection on the forms of power and the mechanisms through which it constructs identities, geographies, and historical narratives.

Austin Camilleri (Malta, 1972) has developed a practice over many years that takes shape from the Mediterranean context and expands across a range of key themes central to his research, several of which will be presented in the gallery. As Lucia Longhi writes in her text: “CHap(ə)l examines the faces and textures of power, bringing to light some of the instruments through which it manifests itself, and in particular the forms derived from colonial power: the control of people’s freedom and identity; the construction of a historical narrative and a distorted cartography; the dissemination of effigies and symbols that flatten the past into a one-way path.”

In the main room of the former butcher’s shop at 1830 Via Garibaldi, Longhi offers an interpretation of the two series presented in the exhibition: Passport Series and Ghost Trip Series. In the first, “Camilleri intervenes directly on the pages of his own passport, covering the personal information in red. It is emblematic that the chosen support is not a neutral material, as a blank sheet of paper would be, but rather an object that already carries its own history and identity. This is a central aspect of the artist’s practice: the materials he chooses always play a role in constructing the meaning of the work, thereby shaping its content and extending the authorship of the work to agents external to himself, in order to amplify its possible interpretations. […] The same act of erasure runs, in another form, through the Ghost Trip Series: here too, Camilleri performs the operation already seen on the passport—covering in order to make disappear. In the upper section of each work, drawings and collages are submerged beneath a layer of blue ink. Here too, it is a history that is being covered: the history of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, a history that one would rather silence, replacing it with a distorted narrative.”

In both series, a further action unfolds: “On white paper, the artist uses a press and small lead bullet cartridges to impress the points marking the shipwrecks of migrant vessels across different areas of the Mediterranean Sea. The result is a new cartography, one that makes tangible on the map – in the literal sense of the term, almost like a Braille image – those events that stand in the way of a triumphant narrative of a stable and just geopolitical balance.”

The exhibition concludes with a new work presented inside the former cold-storage room of the space, bearing the title A Riva. As Longhi observes in her critical text, the work is created by fusing the effigy of Queen Victoria, inspired by the statue in Republic Square in Valletta, with the hull of a boat fused onto its reverse side. The result is an ambiguous figure that invites multiple interpretations and refers to the theory of Hydrarchy.

Taken together, the works brought together in CHap(ə)l articulate a reflection on power not as an abstract phenomenon, but as an experience inscribed in the objects, materials, and images that inhabit everyday life and that, within the artist’s practice, contribute to the construction of meaning in his works. Documents, maps, monuments, and symbols become sites where relationships between the individual and the institution, memory and history, belonging and control are sedimented.